

### The Human Soul:

### Logic, Emotions and Truth

### By

### Jesus (AJ Miller)

Published by

Divine Truth, Australia at Smashwords

http://www.divinetruth.com/

Copyright 2014 Divine Truth

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

### This ebook is a transcript of a seminar delivered on 12th May 2012 in Melbourne, Australia, by Jesus (also known as AJ Miller) as part of the Human Soul series, describing on how to use our intellect and our emotions together to discover God's, or absolute, truth.

### 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.

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Table of Contents

### Logic, Emotions and Truth: Part 1

1. Introduction

2. Overview of the human being

2.1. Being mind dominant

2.2. Determining truth

2.3. Humility opens the doorway to receiving truth and love

2.4. Our emotions drive our thoughts

3. How to determine truth using logical reasoning

3.1. Any intellectual reasoning that we are unsure of the answer requires experimentation

3.1.1. The experimentation basket

3.1.2. The origin of thoughts

3.2. Intellectual thoughts that are harmonious with love must always be retained as truth

3.3. Intellectual thoughts that are disharmonious with love must be discarded as error

3.4. Using prayer and observation to help us discover truth

3.5. Experimenting to discover truth

3.6. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes to discover truth

4. How to determine truth using emotions

4.1. Emotions that we are unsure of the answer to require experimentation

4.2. Emotions that are harmonious with love must always be felt as truth

4.3. Emotions that are disharmonious with love must be released as error

5. Learning how to experiment

5.1. Emotional impediments to experimentation

5.2. The childlike approach to experimentation

6. Discovering truth using both the intellect and emotions

6.1. If something is emotionally and intellectually harmonious with love and truth then it is certain to be God's Truth

6.2. Self honesty is essential for discovering truth

6.3. Examples of using this approach to discover truth

6.3.1. Discovering whether there is a Law of Attraction with regards to money

6.3.2. Dealing with emotions about money

6.4. Attaining a childlike state

6.5. Having no investment in the outcome: an example of AJ and Mary's experience with the media

6.5.1. We feel pain when we have an investment in the outcome

6.5.2. Engaging interactions with love exposes our error

6.6. Discovering Absolute Truth emotionally through experimentation

6.7. Using our intellect to recognise emotions out of harmony with love

6.7.1. Whenever we leave a childlike state we are in error

6.7.2. We need to recognise the extent of our fear and anger in order to change

7. How emotions get created

7.1. Learning to feel as children feel

7.1.1. An example of disciplining a disruptive child

7.2. We have to confront our addictions and feel our fears to become loving

7.3. Working through addictions intellectually and emotionally

### Logic, Emotions and Truth: Part 2

8. Emotional effects of living in addictions

8.1. Removing people from our lives indicates we're in addiction

8.2. Reasons to give up our addictions: love of God, love of self and love of truth

8.2.1. Anger indicates our addiction is not being met

8.2.2. Gender differences in processing emotions

9. An example of learning the truth: dealing with loneliness emotions

9.1. Feeling the error-based emotion and feeling the truth-based emotion

9.2. Experimenting to discover the truth about loneliness

9.2.1. Learning to love and embrace our grief

10. Fears of developing relationships

10.1. Developing a relationship with God

10.1.1. Doubt is an addiction that helps us avoid our fears

11. God's definition of normal versus our definition of normal

11.1. Fear keeps us from becoming God's definition of normal

11.2. Changing our concept of normal

12. Experimenting to get from an intellectual understanding to an emotional understanding of truth

12.1. Speaking the truth experiment

12.2. Desire experiment

12.3. Experiments to address our fears

12.4. The purpose of experimenting is to become more loving, more happy and to determine truth

12.5. An example of breast cancer and mammograms

13. Closing Words

Logic, Emotions and Truth: Part 1

1. Introduction

Well what I'd like to talk with you about today is a continuation of a subject that I've been speaking with people about quite frequently. It's more to do with reminders about how to actually work your way through emotions and also how to work your way through truth. So it's a combination of both subjects; emotions and truth. [00:04:03.20]

So let's write on the board what it's about. It's part of The Human Soul series of talks that I've been doing and this one I was just thinking of calling it something like Emotions Extended or something like that but it's actually an Overview of Emotions is what I would like to raise with you today. [00:04:41.17]

Now the reason why I'd like to raise that with you today is that what I'm finding in my visits with people face to face is that a lot of people are still finding it very, very difficult to get their head out of the way of what's going on inside of themselves emotionally and to actually recognise fully what's going on inside of themselves emotionally. And we find that what's happening many times is that we get to a point where we thought we knew a lot of information and then after a while through our emotional work, we get to a point where we realise that all of that stuff we thought we knew it was only a thought and it wasn't yet a feeling. [00:05:23.26]

So what I would like to do first is describe to you how to look at yourself in terms of your emotional work, in terms of getting closer to God and also getting closer to yourself. So remember that this process, the process of receiving God's Love, is not just about getting closer to God but it's also about coming to know yourself fully and it's one of the only ways in fact that you can ever come to know yourself fully. [00:05:52.14]

2. Overview of the human being

So let's do a bit of an overview first shall we? So what are we made up of? We've got our physical body, our spiritual body and our soul. Let's just draw it as the half of the soul that we actually are and in this case it's the man, so it's just half of the soul, the male half. The feminine part of the soul obviously is the other half and the physical body, the spirit body.

The mind is located within the spirit body (SB) and not the physical body (PB)

Where is our mind? Okay, so our mind is in the spirit body's mind. The brain in the physical body is just used as a tool for the mind to exercise. So there's the mind but you notice that it's not the soul. It's not the real you; the real you is the soul.

2.1. Being mind dominant

If you consider that as the general thing, the mind is in the spirit body, and when you use your intellectual reasoning, that's what you're using. Now the problem that we have on Earth is that we get so used to using our mind to do everything that we start at a very, very young age tuning out of our real emotions and the feelings that are in our soul. So what finishes up happening is during the time we're growing up eventually our mind overcomes our feelings and emotions, so much that in the end we don't feel our emotions very well by the time we become adults. And a lot of the times we have no idea what we're really feeling and we've got to sit and let ourselves feel before we even can discover what we're really feeling, because our mind has been used so much, it's so dominant, that to actually connect back to our feelings is a difficult process. [00:08:10.23]

2.2. Determining truth

So what I would like to do today is to talk more about how emotions work, why this is all very important for us to work through if we want to have a relationship with God and a relationship with ourselves. And also we want to speak about how we determine the truth of an emotion or the truth in any form. How do we recognise truth as a part of this process? Because, a part of this process of course, is understanding truth. [00:08:41.18]

Now the reason why we're discussing the emotions, if we can talk about that first, is because the emotions are the beginning of understanding humility and remember in the process that we've been describing, you've got humility as your number one quality that we really need to develop if we're going to ever know ourselves and if we're ever going to know God. We need to have humility. [00:09:09.12]

2.3. Humility opens the doorway to receiving truth and love

Humility opens the doorway to our reception of truth. So truth is the next step; understanding the truth, now that's not just understanding the truth with our mind, that's actually feeling the truth with our heart, that's a part of the process. So we need to do that. And then once we do that, we can now unblock ourselves to the reception of love. So once we've opened our heart, which is the process of humility opening our heart, and then we've opened our heart now we have the ability to receive truth into our heart and once we can receive truth into our heart, the truth helps us come to terms with what is the truth about ourselves and the truth about God and the truth about the universe and in that process we can then long for love and receive some. But if we haven't got that openness in our heart then it's impossible to receive that love any way.

2.4. Our emotions drive our thoughts

And it's our soul that is the functional part that does all of this, and not our mind. And most of us still usually begin with our mind rather than beginning with our soul. After you've progressed on the Divine Love Path for a long period of time, generally you start getting to this point where it switches over or around and no longer are your thoughts the dominant thing in your life, but rather your emotions are and you start realising that your emotions drive all of your thoughts actually. [00:10:46.04]

And this is why psychologists have come up with this concept of subconscious. The reason why they view it as your subconscious driving your actions is because there is a heavy suppression of emotions and when there's a heavy suppression of emotions you are now using your mind, thinking that you're logical. But the reality is that your mind is still being heavily dominated by the emotions that you're suppressing. So therefore oftentimes we're not as logical as we'd like to believe in our mind because our soul; our emotions which are inside of our soul, drive a lot of our experiences still.

So what we would like to do is understand that becoming humble means becoming humble to what we really feel, not what we would like to believe we feel. They are two very, very different things. What we really feel and what we'd like to believe we feel are completely the opposite in many cases. [00:11:47.26]

You see this very much when you meet some people who've been in religions for many years. They have a very strong opinion about what they are as a character and yet quite often right in that same moment, they can be almost as unloving as a murderer can be. In fact religiously, if you look over the entire world, there are many times that religions drive people to murder another person because they're not in harmony with their belief systems. Now that tells you that their mind allows them to go ahead with that act and yet if they were connected to their heart, they would never be able to go ahead with a murderous act. So there's something wrong, there's obviously some kind of discrepancy between what's really going on and what they think is going on. And this is why we need to discuss this subject quite in detail. [00:12:55.17]

3. How to determine truth using logical reasoning

Now I'm not suggesting in this discussion that we have to throw away logic. In fact my feelings are that God gave us a brain and God gave us also the spirit body and mind which is capable of logical reasoning. So therefore it is something that is necessary to be used in the discovery of truth. So you don't want to throw away your mind, you want to allow your mind to see what is really within your soul. And that's a very, very different process than throwing away the intellect altogether. [00:13:33.05]

So we're not suggesting that you, all of a sudden, just become a totally emotional being without any mental check on what your actions or anything might be leading you towards, but rather you need to come to terms with three or four primary things with regard to your mind. [00:13:51.01]

3.1. Any intellectual reasoning that we are unsure of the answer requires experimentation

So let's look at it with regard to the mind. The first one is any intellectual reasoning that you are unsure of; you need to just go ahead and experiment. So in other words, let's say you have a thought, let's say during the course of a day something happens and you have a thought that you believe that the universe is flat; and if you didn't have any other context in which to measure this thought that you've just had... and this by the way was a thought that many people had a thousand years ago, that the universe and in fact the Earth was flat. Then you would have to put it in the unsure basket because you had no way of proving whether it was flat or not, aside from travel. And unless you had the means to travel you would not be able to test the truth with regard to whether the universe or the Earth itself was flat. [00:15:20.13]

3.1.1. The experimentation basket

And so what you would do with a thought like that, because it's a thought that you're unsure of the answer, you would put it in the experimentation basket. So in other words you'd say, "Right, I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, so that means I need to do more experimentation with that particular question." So instead of coming up with an idea that the Earth is flat and then sticking with it even if it's unproven, what you would do is inside of yourself you'd go, "Anything that's unproven to me... " and it doesn't matter whether it's proven to somebody else, this needs to be related to you, "... if it's unproven to me then I need to put it in the experimentation basket. I'm going to experiment with it." So any intellectual reasoning or any intellectual thought you have, that falls into that basket. [00:16:18.08]

Say, for example, in a relationship you might have a thought all of a sudden that your wife doesn't love you anymore. Now there could be a whole lot of things that are not proven about that yet and you're unsure of it so you'd need to put it in the experiment basket. You'd need to put it into 'this thought requires my attention and requires further investigation'. Can you see that? [00:16:47.23]

Let's say it's something about the universe. Let's say you were designing an aeroplane two hundred years ago when planes weren't yet invented and you wanted to come up with some kind of thought that, "Oh, I can definitely create a flying machine," but you have no way of doing it; you don't know how. So what you would do is you would allow yourself to experiment. You would build a flying machine; the first one you'd build probably wouldn't work so you'd build another one and you'd build another one until you start working out how it works and that's the part of the experiment in process.

Mary you'd like to ask? And by the way you can ask questions through this, we'd just like to record your questions.

Mary: So really this is the process that we're in with regards to our soul. We're experimenting with the fact that we... because for most of us... [00:17:40.11]

We're even experimenting with the fact that we have a soul. You can't say that when I get up here in front of you and I tell you, "Look you've got a soul." You can't straight away say, "Well, yeah I believe that," without knowing for certain through a process of experimenting. Can you see that? So we have to experiment with some things if we want to determine the truth or not. [00:18:06.09]

3.1.2. The origin of thoughts

So that's number one and remember this is to do with the intellect. So we're not discounting the intellect, we are stating that the intellect will often come up with thoughts, thoughts will be just dropped into your head. Now where they come from is debatable. Now sometimes they come from within yourself, sometimes a thought gets dropped into your head... you know you'll be driving along, got the radio turned on in the car and the presenter on the radio drops a thought into your head. Or you might be home just meditating or something like that and then all of a sudden you have a feeling and a certain thought drops into your head that seems to be related to that feeling; that is one thought that I would say is dropped into your head from a spirit. It doesn't really matter where the thought's from, the fact that you're unsure about it means that it needs more experimentation. That's number one. [00:19:09.04]

3.2. Intellectual thoughts that are harmonious with love must always be retained as truth

Two: Intellectual thoughts that are harmonious with love must always be retained as truth. So in other words, if you have an intellectual thought and you can see that this thought is very much in harmony with love, then it's something that you should retain even if you don't believe it yet. You need to retain it as truth inside of yourself because it's harmonious with love. [00:20:16.25]

In other words, love will tell you what's truth or not. There is a direct relationship between love and truth. So love will tell you what's truth. [00:20:33.19]

3.3. Intellectual thoughts that are disharmonious with love must be discarded as error

The third thing is intellectual thoughts that are disharmonious with love must be discarded as error. [00:21:12.27]So if you have an intellectual thought, "I'd like to murder that guy." That's a thought that's popped into your mind. You don't know where it's come from, it might have come from yourself, it might have come from a spirit, or it might have come from prompting of other people around you. It could come from any source, but it's obviously out of harmony with love of the other guy and yourself, so therefore it needs to be discarded, it needs to be thrown away. It's something that you can trust is not truth. Not something that you need to act upon. Not something that you need to experiment with. These three very basic principles will help us to determine truth if we follow them. [00:21:54.11]

So we've got intellectual reasoning that we are unsure of, we need to put it in the experimentation basket. We've got intellectual reasoning of thoughts that are harmonious with love we need to hold on to and keep even if we feel the opposite to it, we still need to hold on to it and keep it. And intellectual thoughts that are disharmonious with love we need to throw away even if we want to hold on to it. We need to throw it away because it's obviously not truth because we can measure whether something is truthful or not by whether it is loving or not, that's the underlying premise.

Participant: Usually when we're coming from a place of error are we really going to know what's loving sometimes? We think it's loving but then we later find out that it's not perhaps.

If you have that suspicion then I'd say that it falls into basket number one. [00:22:51.04]

Participant: Unsure.

Unsure and if I'm unsure then I need to experiment further before I know. So every time, there are times I agree where you think something is loving but God's got a feedback system the Law of Attraction which will tell you whether it's loving or not down the track if you embrace it, and to me that falls into the unsure basket. I'm not a hundred percent positive that that is love or not yet and so I need to experiment with it. [00:23:21.17]

Participant: Even from our environment like in a family situation where you think it's right to treat a person a certain way because it's sort of been shown all our own life? We have a belief that that's the way it happens?

Yes, so the first thing I would do there intellectually is I'd go, "Well would I like to be treated that way?" Well if I wouldn't like to be treated the way that I'm treating that family member, then it obviously in the third category and I need to discard that treatment. If I would like to be treated the way that I'm treating that family member, then it has to fall into one of these two boxes where it's either loving or I'm not sure whether it's loving yet. [00:23:56.12]

Participant: So really it involves a lot of self reflection I guess doesn't it? Not just reaction.

It does. It does. The beauty of it, to a large degree, is initially when you compare these three intellectual thoughts or types of intellectual thoughts, you can say I don't know yet or I don't know for certain. Here (AJ points to point number 3 on the whiteboard) you know for certain something is wrong. So most of us in our heart would know for certain that murder is wrong or murder is unloving so therefore we wouldn't take that action. If a murderer was trying to justify a murder, he might not know so he would fall into this category, so he'd have to experiment with it before he actually engaged in the action. This is before you engage any action. [00:24:56.13]

Participant: A common problem I see though is a person seeing something that's loving, but then it's obviously taxing on themselves. Then they could leave it as thinking that it's a loving and harmonious thought and go off and be helping all these other people at a cost to themselves. [00:25:09.25]

So to me, again, the Law of Attraction would be... they'd embrace it like they think this is true, they believe they know that it's true, but through their emotional process, which is what we're going to add to this... through their emotional process they'll eventually come to see that they feel tired and if they feel tired, something's wrong. So straight away they know something must be wrong. [00:25:33.04]

So far I've only presented half of what we need to do. [00:25:38.25]

Participant: That's alright, maybe I'm thinking ahead a little. [00:25:40.09]

So this is half and this is the intellectual half. So here we're focussed on the intellectual half of what we need to do if we're going to discover truth. But it's not the whole story yet, there's a whole another three things that we need to do at an emotional level to really discover the truth and we need to put it all together rather than separating it from each other.

So at the moment we could be looking at this from an intellectual point only, you can see that while you know it's going to be helpful, it's not going to be certain is it? It's not going to have a definite outcome yet that we need to add things to it before we have a definite outcome. [00:26:29.09]

3.4. Using prayer and observation to help us discover truth

Participant: I'm really stuck in my head and number one... like it sounds easy but I'm so stuck in so many things I can't even come up with the right experiments. How do you find the right questions to ask to experiment with? [00:26:48.28]

Well, each one of these things I suppose has a whole extra set of things we can do, but the first thing I would do is pray because praying you're talking to the Creator of your own self and so therefore anything you're unsure of; the first thing to do would be engage prayer. Remember prayer being a desire that you have for God to tell you truth and so if you had desire for God to tell you the truth, then you would need to observe. So the next thing I would do is observe what happens over the next few days of my life. So this is a part of the experimentation process and we can talk about the experimentation process as a separate issue, I feel, but the main thing we need to do firstly is understand what box it goes into. [00:27:36.17]

3.5. Experimenting to discover truth

So most the time if we don't know what box it goes into then it's in box number one. If we think that we're being loving then its box number two, and if we know that it's not loving, then its box number three. So that's quite a simple intellectual choice at this point. How to go about experimentation is a different discussion which we might put more information on it a bit later after I've presented the other half. Is that alright? [00:28:11.15]

Mary: I was just feeling that it seems like most of the world just operates with this set of rules really, don't we? We inherit a lot of beliefs usually from our parents, or our environment and they say... [00:28:25.10]

Which they teach us as truth!

Mary: ... this is truth, this is loving, this isn't, it's not loving and we just of stick between two and three and before I met you for example, I didn't even engage my soul in... [00:28:38.13]

In an experimentation process!

Mary: ... in experimenting. Even intellectually I didn't really consider much. [00:28:44.03]

3.6. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes to discover truth

Here's a main reason why we don't do number one and that is that we are told we're not allowed to make mistakes and number one is all about making mistakes. So we're told so much in society and in our upbringing that we're not allowed to make mistakes and so what we finish up doing is we finish up not engaging number one because we don't even want to admit that a mistake can be made and so what we do is number two or three. You want me to say that again? [00:29:24.11]

Mary: Yes. I got it, thank you. But I think it leads to the second part of what I feel for myself is this. You're talking about not being about to make mistakes and I think because of that, every time I engage my soul and I discover something that might not be loving, I use my intellect to skip over it or to try to force my emotions into what my intellect says is loving rather than feel the uncertainty of it all and the feeling like I could be in error. [00:30:02.23]

Yes, a lot of people revert to this (number 2) or this (number 3) as a reasoning because they're not prepared to do this (number 1). They're not prepared to go through the process of not knowing. They want to know before they begin an experimentation process. And experimenting with life is essential if you're going to get to know yourself but it's also essential if you're going to get to know God or anybody else. You can't even have a relationship without it being an experiment; really can you, if you think about it? [00:30:36.21]

So we need to engage this actively. We need to stop judging ourselves for not knowing, in other words. We need to be happy that we don't know because we can put it in box number one and experiment with the knowledge and by engaging a process that we can talk about in a minute. [00:30:58.00]So we're a bit in the mind at this point trying to understand a soul based process but it's important for us to understand it. So are there any questions about the intellect here?

Participant: Maybe this is in the next part too but I can see there are emotions obviously that drive the "I don't want to be wrong" stuff that affects number one. [00:31:30.12]

There are.

Participant: But also in number three I'm kind of stuck on, "Well I can't discard this murderous thought," or whatever it is because there are emotions that are driving that as well. [00:31:39.22]

Yes. Well when I say discard it, because it's a thought, you can discard thoughts. Feelings are a bit different. Feelings are a bit harder to discard. We can discuss how to discard them but they're a bit harder to discard. Any other questions?

Participant: I was just wondering whether you might give an example. I'm kind of not sure of your context in terms of the first question or statement? [00:32:15.16]

I'm saying that anything that you could possibly think of in the universe that arrives to you as a thought, anything, if you're unsure of the answer then it goes into box number one. [00:32:31.09]

Participant: Okay it's big.

So it's big. Anything that you could possible conceive! So you pick up a musical instrument, sit it on your lap and the question you have is, "How do I play it?" The answer is, "I'm unsure." So what do you do? You need to experiment. What most people do with a musical instrument, they pick up the musical instrument and look at it in confusion and even though they love music, they don't want to go through the process of experimenting and failing and making mistakes and so for the majority of people, like if I ask an audience generally, put up your hand if you love music, almost everybody in the audience generally puts up their hand. Put up your hand if you play music. You see there's one quarter, maybe less, who play music. [00:33:25.14]

Now why is there a discrepancy between the people who love music and the people who play music? It's because the other people have not yet experimented with the playing of music. It's just because they're unsure or a lot of things might have happened in their childhood which caused them to feel like they can't really do that or it's not possible or they might have things happening in their life that cause them to feel like it's too hard to go through the process of practising an hour a day to get used to it now because you've got a busy life. There might be all sorts of reasons, but it really is something that you need to experiment with. [00:34:01.13]

If you love music and you don't play it, then why not experiment with it and be prepared for the fact that you're probably going to fail when you first start? And in fact everybody who learns how to play a musical instrument usually goes through the first ten to twenty weeks with a feeling of failure, almost everybody that you ever hear of learning to play an instrument as an adult. As a child they don't worry about that generally so much. We were a bit more accepting of failure when we were a child, than we are as an adult. [00:34:36.21]

So yes, this applies to everything you can think of on every subject you can think of in the universe that can come into your mind. So it's a large scope. [00:34:47.02]

Okay, are there any more questions about the intellect? No? So shall we proceed with the emotions? [00:34:55.27]

4. How to determine truth using emotions

Now the emotional content of looking at whether something is true or not is almost identical to this and all we need to take out are the words "intellectual reasoning" and replace them with the word "emotions". So let's do that. [00:35:13.22]

4.1. Emotions that we are unsure of the answer to require experimentation

So we've got number one, emotions that you are unsure of the answer to we need to experiment with. That's basically number one. [00:35:50.22]

Mary: Are you saying if we're unsure if they're loving? Are you saying if...

If we're unsure that they're loving, we're unsure that they're truthful, we're unsure that they... Mary: So if I feel like you don't love me? Yeah!

Mary: Then I need to... but I don't know if that is the truth or if that is just a feeling that I'm having? [00:36:09.07]

Exactly, so you need to experiment. So you need to find out the answer to that, particularly if we're in a relationship.

Mary: Yeah, interesting example... but so this whole process is really designed to help us discover the truth of everything? [00:36:26.02]

Of everything! The truth of everything!

Mary: Which is something that we can discover? Which is something we are able to discover, yep? God created a beautiful universe that we are able to discover the truth on every single subject imaginable, but we have to engage a process. [00:36:45.12]

4.2. Emotions that are harmonious with love must always be felt as truth

So number two. So it's basically two is the same as this one (AJ points to point two of the intellectual reasoning on the whiteboard). So emotions that are harmonious with love must always be retained. When I say retained... and felt as truth. They are the truth, if they're harmonious with love they are the truth. [00:37:28.26]

Participant: When you say must always be retained; you can't actually discard them can you? When they are harmonious with love? [00:37:28.26]

Probably retained is not the word I should be using. It's probably just must be felt as truth. So emotions pass through you. They don't stay with you. As you know in the course of a day you can have many emotions and in one day you can have loving emotions come up and you can have very hateful emotions come up, very angry emotions come up, very sad emotions come up all in the course of one day and that's because emotions have the ability to pass through you and so you can feel them as they come. [00:38:07.12]

So emotions that are harmonious with love must always be felt but they must always be respected as truth as well because they're harmonious with love. Remember there's this relationship between love and truth. And I'm not just talking about your own truth here; I'm talking about God's Truth, Universal Truth. So the way we can know whether something is truthful as an emotion is when we're feeling something is if it has a love as its basis. [00:38:41.19]

Is anger a love based emotion? Some people may say that it is but obviously it isn't. It always causes somebody pain usually anger does. So I would say that that is an emotion that is not harmonious with love and therefore you must feel it as error, not truth. So whenever you are angry, it's capable of telling you the truth but it's not... if you live in the anger, if you just live in the anger and become enraged with the world, then it's not going to be harmonious with love and therefore it's not harmonious with God's Truth. These things are going to confront some of you as we go through them. [00:39:25.12]

Mary: So I'm just interested in what you're saying about anger and truth. I would love for you to describe, and I have some experience of observing you do this but this is something I still grapple with, but how you determine truth through understanding love and your other emotions. I watch you do that all the time. Can you give an example of how you do that? [00:39:57.25]

Well what say we finish the three and then what we need to do of course is merge this together because if we use our emotions without our intellect, we are going to have certain dangers and if we use our intellect without our emotion, we're going to have certain dangers. We're not going to be able to determine the truth if we do one or the other. We have to amalgamate the two of them together. [00:40:23.04]

So it's very important to understand that what we're trying to do is discover a way here of experimenting and discovering truth ourselves. Not having to rely on anybody else in the universe or anybody else on Earth for the discovery of truth: this is how we can discover truth ourselves. So remember everything that we're trying to teach, myself and Mary, is how to become self aware and self responsible. So you want to get to a stage where you don't have to listen to anybody else about what's true or not if you don't want to and still be able to discover truth for yourself. [00:40:59.20]

You think about a scientist who's on the forefront of any type of endeavour. He has nobody else to tell him what is true or not. So what does he do? He's unsure when he begins and what does he do? He experiments. So scientists are very, very used to experimenting in the physical layer or physical level generally. Now there are a whole set of scientific endeavours that could be investigated on a spiritual layer but that's not as popular. What I'm saying is on any layer we need to experiment. So any spiritual layer or soul based layer we need to experiment with, if we are unsure of truth. [00:41:43.07]

The way I see life is, well I sort of see it like a scientist sees physical life. A scientist sees physical life as something to just enjoy the discovery process of and that's how I see all my life as something that we can go through the process of experimenting with in every aspect of our life. We're not limited to physical life, but spiritual life, our love relationships, all of the things in our life that we can ever engage; we can experiment with and find the truth of, every single time. That's what I'm saying. [00:42:23.29]

4.3. Emotions that are disharmonious with love must be released as error

Okay let's put number three just to write it down because we know what it is now. So it's, emotions that are disharmonious with love must be released as error. [00:42:59.22]

So I have a feeling inside of me of resentment for somebody and that resentment has built now to such a point that I would really like to harm them. I'd really like to punish them somehow, like attack them or do something to their life that hurts them. Now obviously that is out of harmony with love, that feeling. [00:43:23.06]

Now it has to be released as error. In other words instead of acting upon it as a truth, I need to go, "right, it's an emotion that's out of harmony with love, so I need to stop acting upon it and I need to somehow..." And we'll talk about how as we go along, "I need to somehow release it. I need to somehow get it out of me so that it's not in me anymore. And once it's not in me anymore, it won't define my life anymore. And once it doesn't define my life anymore, then I'll be free of that emotion and I'll have gotten rid of something inside of me that's out of harmony with love." [00:43:59.22]

So how are we going so far?

Participant: What I have trouble with is if someone's telling me something and yet I'm getting a different feeling than what they're telling me and then I don't know whether my feelings are wrong or they're telling me an untruth and I just get totally confused. [00:44:20.04]

So that falls in the basket number one on this side doesn't it? Participant: Yeah, but then I don't know how to experiment.

5. Learning how to experiment

So can you see that part of the problem is most of us have got no idea how to experiment? That's part of the problem here isn't it? [00:44:33.19]

You see we're so used to either going there (2) or there (3) every time in our life or being forced to go there and there every time in our life through society and through our upbringing. In other words we've been told what truth is and we've been told what error is and we're given no choice to experiment. That's how we've been brought up, most of us, and as a result of that we have no idea how to go through an experimenting type of process. [00:44:58.13]

And we also have a lot of emotional impediments associated with going through a process because we hate not knowing, usually inside of ourselves. So what we do is we try to convince ourselves that we know even when we don't know. I remember once opening the bonnet of a vehicle and there was a woman and I asked her to point out the battery to me and her father as a joke had pointed out the carburetor as a battery to her when she was young, as a joke, and she completely believed that the carburetor was the battery. And that's the problem... how does she correct that error? Only by experimenting, but because she just accepted daddy's word, a bit of a cruel thing to do as a dad, he might have thought it was a joke at the time but it was a bit cruel, and now she was adamant that's the battery there. A bit hard to take that battery out and replace it! [00:46:04.13]

So she needs to experiment and the problem is that most of the people around us do not like us experimenting. Have you noticed that? Most people around us don't like us experimenting. So the problem we face is how do we go about these experiments? [00:46:26.29]

5.1. Emotional impediments to experimentation

Many of us have very large emotional impediments to experimentation. One of the primary impediments is that we wish to retain the approval of others while we are experimenting. That's one of our primary impediments. So if you imagine the Wright Brothers, when they were building their aeroplane, having to retain the approval of others while they were doing their experiments, I wonder how long it would have taken them to have achieved flight? A much longer time than it did by them not listening to anybody and trusting their own intellect and experiments emotionally. [00:47:14.06]

So if you look at every new thing, every new endeavour that has ever been created on this planet, the person who created it was willing to experiment and willing to experiment without the approval of others. [00:47:33.10]

5.2. The childlike approach to experimentation

Participant: So it's really curiosity isn't it? Like children are curious so we retain that curiosity...

Yes, so you think of a child doing an experiment, if we focus on that. The first one is curiosity is a major part of this experimentation process, yes? What else does a child do when it experiments have you noticed? [00:48:14.20]

Participant: They're much more emotionally open than I certainly am, so they feel.

So would you say they're open, transparent, non critical? They just absorb just like a sponge, they're like a sponge aren't they? [00:48:35.27]

Participant: And they're desirous, they're just...

They have desire yes, good. Anything else you can think of that a child is?

Participant: I was just going to say they're in awe.

Yeah, they're in awe. You know what we do as adults? We hear one sentence and by the time we've got to the second sentence a lot of times we've already made up our mind. That's often the case. A child doesn't do that do they; they listen to the whole thing generally, particularly if they've asked you. How many of you have had children? How many of your children have said, "Daddy, daddy, how does this work? Daddy, why does that happen? Daddy, why does this happen?" Or, "Mummy why is this why is that, why is this why is that?" Have you noticed that when they're very young? Both of my boys did exactly that all the time. Like, daddy this, daddy that, daddy... question, question, question, question.

So they are willing to ask questions. So this is part of the process of experimenting. [00:50:03.09]

Participant: They don't have any fear.

So they've got very little fear or no fear generally and if they do have fear, a lot of times it's a parent reflecting it for you anyway. [00:50:15.29]

Participant: They're very trusting.

They trust yes. It's interesting this attitude of trust; they don't trust necessarily that the answer is correct, but they are open enough to trust that the person who's giving the answer is being honest. So they at least trust that. Later on they work out whether the answer is correct or not, generally. [00:50:42.01]

Participant: They're not invested in an outcome.

Okay, yes, no investment. Now you think how often we ask questions that we've got total investment in, in comparison? Yeah! So a child has no investment in the outcome. A child is just, "Oh...okay, okay..." There's no emotional investment in the outcome. [00:51:09.06]

Mary: Just in the asking questions, they're very honest about the fact that they don't know or that they're in a process of experimentation. [00:51:15.20]

So they're humble.

Mary: They're humble, they're not afraid. Some people would call that vulnerable, but they don't even feel vulnerable, they just feel trusting. [00:51:23.28]

In fact they view it as a normal course of their daily life that they should have the right to ask a question. Don't they? And it's only when we suppress them; "Stop asking questions." And you see a lot of parents whenever you're in a shopping centre or something walking along with a child and he's, "Yes, daddy this, daddy that..." "Can you just stop asking questions?" And a lot of times that's the parent's emotion because they don't know the answers to these questions and a lot of times the parents are not willing to say, "I don't know, that needs to be in my experiment basket too." But as parents we often want to give the impression we know and so we want to shut the child down if they ask a question we don't know the answer to. [00:52:07.29]

Many of you have seen children ask me the question, "Where did God come from?" It's mostly children that ask that question and you've seen me give the answer; "I've got no idea," is my answer. And the child goes, "Okay," and then moves on to the next question. It's very rare for an adult to ask that question because they want to have the idea inside of themselves that they would know the answer or it's one of those questions that confounds them and they don't like being in a permanent state of being confounded. [00:52:43.28]

So when you experiment, you're able to be in a permanent state of being confounded on that subject until it gets an answer. But what if it's ten years? Are you willing to be confounded for ten years? If you're truly open you'll be willing to be confounded. [00:53:00.28]

So this is what the child does through the experiment process. Can you see why we don't want to experiment very much? And can we just say something about that, because we haven't listed the primary one of the things, the child does not care about mistakes. It's only when we punish the child, or we punish the children that it begins to feel a consequence for a mistake. And once it starts associating pain with the mistake, it's going to try to avoid mistakes. But the problem with avoiding mistakes is that if you avoid mistakes you also avoid experimentation. [00:53:52.14]

Do you think that the average scientist gets out there, creates an experiment and it works a hundred percent of the time every time, the first time? You have some scientists doing experiment after experiment after experiment for ten years, twenty years, and thirty years before they find an answer. That's a willingness to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake until they get an answer. That's the attitude we need to have in our life. [00:54:28.25]

Participant: I notice it's all a buzz but at the moment, in the moment, I notice that kids aren't thinking about the future and not about the past, they're living as things happen. [00:54:37.27]

So they're in the present. They are present in a discussion with a person. As an adult you think a lot of the times when we ask a question, we're not really asking a lot of the times the question that we really needed to ask. We're asking a question that usually is modified for public consumption and has very little to do with our personal life because we don't like to mention our personal life. So what we do is we think; I'll give you an example, "Yeah the other day I really thought like I would like to have sex with that person who's not my partner." Now I can't really say that in a public group without feeling judged and all these other things. So what I'll do is I'll say the question like this, "What if somebody actually has thoughts about having lustful thoughts about another person who's not their partner?" [00:55:38.21]

Now can you see I've now disassociated the actual question from myself? I've pushed it away from myself. I'm already in modification because of my own judgement of the actual issue. So therefore I'm already in fear, I've already got an investment in the outcome, I'm already closing myself down towards experimentation. This is what we do automatically.

6. Discovering truth using both the intellect and emotions

Okay so now that we have got this down on the board, what we need to do is marry or amalgamate these two concepts together: the concept of intellectually working something out and emotionally working something out. And we need to see that a lot of the times we are very versed in this part (AJ points to the intellectual side on the whiteboard) because we've been brought up with this part and in particular the part that we're the most versed in is these two parts here (AJ highlights points 2 and 3 on the intellectual side of the whiteboard; intellectual thoughts that are harmonious with love and intellectual thoughts that are disharmonious with love). That's where most of the world that we live in operates, where they believe they know what's loving in their mind or they believe they know what's not loving in their mind and they act according to that every single time without any experimentation and without any further information available. [00:57:15.26]

Now some people have grown to this part (AJ highlights point 1 on the intellectual side of the whiteboard; using experimentation to determine truth intellectually) and you see this happening on a physical level with scientists in particular where they are experimenting through an intellectual process. So they are already going through that in a physical layer. Most scientists are very averse to going through it in a spiritual layer or a spirit body layer, if you like a metaphysical layer, or a soul based layer, but there are some scientists who are now doing that and so they are willing to experiment intellectually in those regards. [00:57:51.16]

Most of us are totally inept when it comes to this side, the whole emotional side particularly when we start because we've become so detuned from the childlike process of experimenting. We've become so detuned from our emotions altogether that we don't even or rarely even know when we're experiencing an emotion. So this is a main problem that we have for many of us. [00:58:24.08]

But what I'm saying is if you want to determine truth on any subject in the universe, that's the scope, you need to do both things at the same time. You need to compare these things and we can come up with many examples in a minute of how to go ahead with these particular experiments if you like of what's actually going on. There are some general things that we can do that will help us to determine whether we're actually getting anywhere near the truth or whether we are still a long way away from truth or not. [00:59:07.12]

Are there any questions before we proceed? Is everyone okay with that? As a general concept! So it's a very general concept of how to go about discovering truth. Mary would you like to say... [00:59:28.08]

Mary: I was just going to say that we live in a very post modernist world, which just says that you can't ever know truth. [00:59:37.12]

Exactly! Now can I just say that whenever we have the attitude that we can't ever know truth, then it's highly unlikely we're ever going to experiment? [00:59:48.17]

Mary: Yeah, it seems to me the ultimate way to avoid the first two top columns (Mary refers to the experimenting, with the intellect and emotions parts on the whiteboard). [00:59:53.07]

It is.

Mary: And it seems to me, for me personally, to be driven by a sense of hopelessness or disillusionment where obviously this feeling that I can't ever experiment with things has just been totally squashed somehow or I've felt that past experiments have lead me to more uncertainty. So that's why I'm very interested in this...

And yet what does a child do?

Mary: Just continues asking questions.

Exactly so your child always trusts that the truth is available always. Like a child never goes, "The truth's not available and so I won't even ask daddy that." You don't see children doing that until they start getting shut down from their parents you don't see them doing that. Why? Because they trust that the truth is always available and I believe God put in us this underlying feeling inside of us that we can trust the fact that truth is available. [01:00:55.27]

Mary: That we're sort of wired to search for truth.

We're wired to find it, yeah.

Mary: And if I look at the physical world it's so obvious that man wants to go to Mars and do everything to discover the truth of the physical world but there's this kind of a spiritual wasteland now in terms of a feeling like, "Well there are many truths." And I find that very confronting for myself just to know there is one truth, but I have to be humble enough to find it. [01:01:30.09]

But an interesting thing is that a child believes there is one truth on every subject.

Mary: Inherently.

Inherently, which is an interesting concept in itself? You see that's why I said in the first century, "You must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of God," because without these ways of seeing things, you're not able to experiment so you're never going to become a person who understands truth. [01:01:54.29]

Mary: And it seems to be also that the Law of Attraction is the way for us to experiment. Like God's created a feedback system already that we can... [01:02:05.19]

Yeah, I'd call the Law of Attraction a feedback system. It's not the way to experiment because you can experiment by not having things be attracted to you that are negative or positive. You can experiment by observing other people's negative and positive attractions. So that's one way of experimenting. So there are many ways to experiment, not just your own Law of Attraction. [01:02:32.10]

Participant: Where does the belief fit in then? Is it an intellectual thing?

Well some of our beliefs are intellectual and some of our beliefs are emotional and some of what we call our subconscious beliefs; are actually emotional. So yeah, you know it could be either and the key with all of our belief systems is while we're unsure we just need to put it in the unsure box. [01:02:55.01]

Participant: And then it will become a feeling...

6.1. If something is emotionally and intellectually harmonious with love and truth then it is certain to be God's Truth

Well it's only when the feeling and the thought, and this are something that I haven't yet mentioned to you and that's something that I must mention to you. The second point in both the intellectual and emotional areas are very important to you because if something is emotional, harmonious with love and truth and intellectual at the same time harmonious with love and truth, you can be very, very certain that it is actually God's Truth. [01:03:34.12]

So this is a very important thing to understand. If they are both in play at the same time, then there's a very, very good chance that what you've now discovered is not only a truth about yourself but also a truth about the universe as well. Something what you would say is Absolute Truth. [01:03:57.13]

So the beauty of Absolute Truth is that it's always in this domain of number two of both columns. Absolute Truth is always in that domain. [01:04:13.00]

Participant: I'm confused. So if you're feeling something inside yourself and the feeling is that it's love and intellectually you're able to examine it and say yes that's love. [01:04:26.24]

That seems like love to me, yes.

Participant: So that's what you're saying when the mind and the emotions marry up? [01:04:32.10]

Yes, when you feel a feeling of love at the same time as you intellectually analyse the thing and you have the thought that there is a love here as well. So, for example, many times we're not honest with ourselves and this is the underlying thing we need to be is honest with ourselves.

6.2. Self honesty is essential for discovering truth

Many times people say to me, "I think that is the most loving thing to do." For example, many people who are members of a religion tell me that it's right for them to ex-communicate gay people from the religion. In other words that it's right for them to remove a person who's homosexual from the religion. [01:05:13.05]

Now, and many times their intellectual thought is that is the loving thing to do but let's look at the emotions. What's the feeling they have whenever they think of a gay couple? [01:05:30.23]

Participant: But if they knew that it was unloving...

No, what I'm saying is that they don't know because they've separated the emotion from the intellect. You see what they've done is they've looked at what they believe is a rule book they call the Bible or God's Word and in there, in the First Corinthians, it actually says that gay people or homosexuals will not inherit God's Kingdom. That's what it says there and so they have now intellectually accepted that as a truth without feeling about it. [01:05:59.09]

Participant: So they've blocked themselves from the feeling of it?

Yes because if they felt their feeling they would feel this feeling of anger towards homosexuals, their feeling of wanting to punish a homosexual. A lot of feelings that are present there in the statement! [01:06:13.25]

Participant: They might be feeling those things and thinking it's okay. Because I think I've done stuff like that, not in that instant. [01:06:18.24]

Yeah, I agree, I agree, but what I'm saying is that when you're angry, are you loving? Obviously not! We can tell ourselves we are. This is where we need to be honest with ourselves. You see self honesty is the underlying crux of this entire diagram, if you like, how we can discover truth. [01:06:41.14]

If we're not honest with ourselves, we'll lie to ourselves about whether we feel love or not. So I've seen a person yelling at a homosexual saying that he loves him. Actually, yelling at him, screaming at him, saying that he loves him. I can't agree. The fact that you're yelling and screaming means you don't, right in that moment, love the person. And if the person themselves who is doing the yelling and screaming sat down and imagined himself or herself being yelled and screamed at, would she then or he then feel that they're being treated lovingly? I would argue with you that they would definitely not feel it if they were on the receiving end of it, they would see instantly that they were being unloving. [01:07:28.14]

And this is what we need to do we need to start allowing ourselves to be far more self reflective as Cornie pointed out. So if we're not self reflective then we are going to justify unloving behaviour and we're going to tell ourselves that we're being loving but it's only an intellectual thought. [01:07:46.23]

I'm saying that what we need to do is be far more open than that, that's what we need to do. And one of the main reasons why we justify rage based behaviour is due to our own addictions. This is where I'm going with this. So in our next part of the discussion we'll look at the general layer of emotion that causes us to believe that we are doing the right thing when we're actually doing the wrong thing. [01:08:16.25]

6.3. Examples of using this approach to discover truth

Participant: Can I just get you to please put the stuff here in the context of your own experience? How have you used these in your own life? [01:08:28.27]

Yeah, good question, yeah. Basically my entire life is built upon these six things, actually. My entire life! I don't ever hold onto an opinion as truth unless it is in this range of emotions here and intellect here (AJ illustrates point 2 on the intellect and emotion sides of the whiteboard). So I don't hold onto any other truth unless it goes into both of those boxes.

6.3.1. Discovering whether there is a Law of Attraction with regards to money

Now I can bring probably lots of different examples to it. Okay, is there a Law of Attraction? Well let's say in the beginning all you're doing is asking the question. Is there a Law of Attraction? Now many people in the world would say there's no such thing as a Law of Attraction, but my suggestion is instead of saying there is no such thing, you first need to go through and do some experiments. [01:09:28.09]

So what I do with my life is I experiment. So I go, okay, firstly I experiment with my mind. I go, okay if there is such a thing as a Law of Attraction then the way it's being presented to me by society generally or by people who think they know about the Law of Attraction is that all I need to do is think something long enough and it will happen. [01:09:55.20]

Now I don't know if you've ever put that into practise but I haven't found that to work, myself. So after I did some experiments about that, I believed that if there was a Law of Attraction then it had nothing to do with the mind. A valid assumption based on the experiments that I undertook in terms of thinking something and whether it came true or not.

And then what I did was I had to be far more self reflective and humble and had to feel about my own emotions and I realised, "Okay, I've got some emotions," for instance, "emotions about money". Almost everyone on the planet has emotions about money. Most of us have a lot of fear based emotions about money. [01:10:38.13]

So Okay, I recognise I've got some fear based emotions about money. If I deal with some of these emotions about money by actually feeling them and releasing them, let's experiment with that and to see whether my attractions with money change. So when I first started doing these talks for the first four years, I never received a single donation. [01:11:11.15]

Obviously I had some emotions about money because if I was sitting in an audience listening to a lot of this information, I'd probably just donate without being asked. So I had to look at that and go, "Okay people appreciate the information but it's getting to the point where I'm going to have to go out and work and stop doing these talks and I didn't want to do that." So I needed to look at myself to see whether there is such a thing as the Law of Attraction about money. [01:11:41.18]

And so what I did was I experimented with that. I went through some emotions and then tried to see whether there was a correlation between dealing with the emotion and an outcome which was receiving more funds so that I could continue to do these talks. And what I found in the end was that there was a direct correlation. In fact it often happened the very day that I dealt with a specific emotion related to money. The very next day I would receive some more money to do something that I wanted to do that I couldn't do before then. And so I started to see there is this issue of money and there was obviously something going on with my feelings attracting things, not my thoughts. [01:12:24.07]

That's not the first issue I chose. The first issue I chose was to do with God and my relationship with God because to me that's the most important thing. But that's just giving you an example of how you can experiment. [01:12:39.09]

6.3.2. Dealing with emotions about money

Most people are not willing to experiment right to the end. And when I say right at the end, most of you will not allow yourselves to get completely broke in order to find out what emotions are inside of you that cause your money issues. So what most of us finish up doing is we get down to what we feel is an acceptable buffer in the bank and then what do we do? We than do something physically to go and fix that issue up. That's what we do, because we're not willing to face the emotion of being destitute. We're not willing to experiment with that emotion. [01:13:31.12]

Participant: So AJ do we have to actually get to the point where we're actually broke and have nothing to actually feel the destitute emotion that we need to release? [01:13:42.24]

No we don't have to but as you've found in your own life you didn't deal with it before then. So the reality is we don't have to come up against a wall every time that we deal with something but unfortunately, for most of us, we are not willing to deal with something before we hit that wall. [01:14:05.12]

Participant: Is it this the process that you go through that allows slowly the different emotions to come up in relation to, for instance, money issues?

Yeah, so if you think about my recommendations to you and to Anto about money issues, you know how you were so afraid to go and buy something because if you bought something you'd have no money left. And then if you had no money left then you didn't know what you were going to do, right? And both being professional people, you're used to having a steady buffer and flow of money. So this time you wanted to go and buy something but you weren't prepared to go and buy it and there was all this fear driving you and my recommendation to you guys was, buy it because it's what you want, and then let all the emotions come up about not having any money left over to build on it. And as you've worked out that's exactly what's coming up for you. [01:15:04.24]

Participant: Yep, I'm feeling at the moment a lot of those issues are coming up for both of us. There's a lot of anger and a lot of fear about it, but we don't have to get to the point where if we've got zero in the account to deal with that emotion? [01:15:22.18]

Well, it depends on a few things doesn't it? It depends on how humble you are because if you're very resistive you might have to get to that point. [01:15:31.11]

Participant: Yep, okay.

And it depends on how much fear you have. It depends on how much trust in God you have. It depends on how much of a personal investment you have in the outcome. [01:15:42.27]

Participant: And the lack of faith too in God, I'm feeling that that's a big one.

Yes. So for many of us we've got so many different emotions inside of us and you can see that one little issue, like the money issue, can bring up lots and lots of different emotions that are not childlike inside of us that have obviously been modified and they're no longer childlike, and as a result of that, going through the process will help us immensely to discover these emotions and work our way through them. [01:16:12.18]

Now, how bad things get in our life is completely dependent upon how resistive we are to actually having these qualities develop inside of ourselves. Totally! It depends on that. [01:16:26.26]

Participant: So just keep focussing on our humility.

And having no investment in the outcome! Which is very hard isn't it?

Participant: Yeah.

When we talk about money, everybody wants to have an investment in the outcome and I'm saying no investment; that's what a child would do. A child's perfectly willing to spend its last cent and not know where the next one is coming from. Why? Because the child believes that the next cent is going to come from mummy and daddy. Is that not true? And then we grow up to be an adult and what do we now believe? The next cent is not going to come from mummy and daddy but who's your daddy? God's your daddy. God wants to give you everything you want right? [01:17:17.18]

Participant: But AJ would you still say that as a child if we've still got that expectation that our mum and dad will provide, we could still have that as adults? Is that true? [01:17:29.00]

Yes and instead we expect society to provide, or we refer that emotion on to somebody else generally. So many of us have an expectation for something like unemployment benefits for example because of that same feeling that we don't feel that we are able to create ourselves what we need without having to work very, very hard for it. [01:17:55.28]

Can you see the relationship with the childlike state? For example daddy gives the child twenty dollars. The child wants to spend it straight away generally; it's very rare that a child wants to save it without having a lot of bartering with mum and dad about that. Daddy goes, "Do you want to put it in a bank?' And why does daddy do that? Because daddy wants to put it in the bank too and the child generally wants to just go and spend it because it wants to utilise the resources that are available to it instantly, you see? And if we were not living in fear, we would want to do that all the time. We would want to utilise the resources available to us instantly. We don't want to store resources away because who knows what will happen? Tomorrow we might be dead. [01:18:48.06]

In the first century I gave an illustration of a man building up lots and lots of storehouses and he got his very biggest storehouse built and he died the very next day, that very night. I said in the illustration what good was it all to him then?

You see a child doesn't do that, a child just engages the process of using every single investment it gets in a manner that's completely in harmony with no fear and its desires. And when we do that, we get to become very trusting with God.

Participant: So AJ when's that point when we get to that? The struggle of that at the moment... I don't know.

You'll get to it when all of the emotions that are in disharmony with love have been released on the subject of money then a feeling of peace will come over you instead of you going, "What's going to happen in the next moment?" [01:19:49.23]

Participant: How many blocks do we have?

How long is a piece of string, Jane? It depends upon you, your family, and your upbringing; how your family brought you up to believe, what they brought you up to believe. What society brought you up to believe? Honestly if you were living in India, it would be a lot lower threshold or if you were living in Somalia, it would be a lot lower threshold than what you currently have. In other words they would readily accept these beliefs and teachings in comparison to yourself on the subject of money because they have none and so therefore they've never had any to save, they've never had any to worry about, they've never had any to invest all of this time and energy intellectually and emotionally on and so therefore to them it's not even a problem. So in the Western world we have a whole set of problems that are very, very different to other parts of the world because of these emotions that are a part of our upbringing. [01:20:46.10]

Participant: So we just keep going.

Yeah, the reason why you're asking the question is because you have fear. You are worried that you're going to have to become destitute before you deal with the emotion and I'm saying to you well perhaps that is going to be required before you unlock yourself from the emotions themselves. It doesn't have to be the case but it depends... every single person here is very different with how they've been brought up, right? Even though we've all been brought up in a Western society generally here, we've all been brought up very differently by our parents and so because of that we all have very different belief systems about money and as a result of that, once we start confronting them, it's going to be very, very different emotionally. [01:21:33.04]

So notice the non-childlike feelings, which are, "I am afraid, I don't have any trust in God, I'm worried about the outcome, and I have an investment in the outcome." They are all non-childlike feelings and they are telling us the truth. They are telling us that yes there are still emotions there, still emotions there that need to be addressed, that need to be released. Emotions that are out of harmony with love because if we were in love we wouldn't have fear, there's no fear in love.

So if we would go through each day feeling like, "Oh yeah, bank account, no bank account, who cares?" It's not a lack of responsibility feeling either. I am completely responsible for everything that I spend my money on, as you well know, so I'm not encouraging a lack of responsibility here; I'm encouraging trust in God. You know God provides for every single animal on this Earth and they don't have to do a single thing. [01:22:43.08]

Participant: So it's the same with us, AJ? We feel to get money we need to go to work but I think it's because we don't feel that God give us the abundance; that we can survive just relying on God. [01:23:02.08]

Exactly and I'm not saying you won't have to work because obviously working is a part of the things you need to learn about love because if you love yourself you'll want to care for yourself. So that is a part of what you would discover through this process of I want to love. But I wouldn't want to work in a job that I hated. [01:23:21.01]

Participant: Well that's the thing - if we're working in what our desires are.

So if Anto went back to being a lawyer he would be doing totally the opposite of what his desires are. He's never really wanted to do that and so if he went back to that, then of course he wouldn't love himself, he'd just be acting out of fear.

But there is work that you can engage in. Mary and I work pretty much every day as most of you who know us well know. There's very rarely a day goes past where we've having a relaxing day in the sense of not having some kind of work happening. And the reason why is because we love our work and because we don't even view it as work, so we're just busy every day just doing what we love doing. And when you engage some kind of a job with that passion that you love doing, things will come to you automatically and this is what we need to learn from God and what we need to learn from all the animals and what we need to learn from our environment. [01:24:23.26]

We are the pinnacle of God's creation and yet we act like we're the least important to God. From God's perspective we were the pinnacle of His creation and yet every single day we act like God doesn't care about us at all. That's how we act and yet we've got plenty of evidence that there's plenty of care around us. It's just a matter of us embracing an attitude or an emotion. [01:24:52.17]

Getting back to the Law of Attraction question that was asked; so with regard to the money, all I did was experiment with this Law of Attraction and emotions that actually affected the Law of Attraction with money. Then as I experimented with that, I saw an immediate result and therefore I can measure whether I've actually dealt with something or not and that then causes me to believe in the Law of Attraction. It also causes me then to believe more firmly that if I look at my emotions that are out of harmony with love, it will always benefit my life and now I trust that implicitly. So initially I didn't trust that. Initially I didn't really believe that, but now I trust that implicitly because my life is engaging that every single day and I get results every single day from that. So that's why I trust it implicitly. [01:25:49.13]

6.4. Attaining a childlike state

Participant: So you're saying that basically you adopted all these childlike things in your experiment to get to the conclusion that you're after? [01:25:59.12]

Yes. You know how the world is addicted to being adult. We put on a facade, we get all dressed up and we get all flash and we're addicted to the facade. Well a lot of people are dead broke and yet they drive around in an expensive vehicle and they're living in an expensive home and so forth. They're working in a job they don't like to support it all and they're not living an honest life because it's nothing what they want really, they're doing it for emotional reasons. [01:26:35.19]

But if they adopted a childlike attitude, does a child live in a facade?

A child will do a poo right in front of you. I'm not suggesting that you need to do that but I'm saying you go down the lolly aisle, a child would scream when it doesn't get what it wants and I'm not saying you should do that either because both things would be out of harmony with love and the child does need to learn what is harmonious with love. But a child has not got this investment in what other people think of it and as we grow up to be adults we are totally invested in what other people think of us. You think about how much of your life is planned around what other people think of you. A lot of our life is planned around it. [01:27:24.00]

And there are whole jobs that are all about that. Like the advertising job, the media job, public relations job. What are they about? Maintaining image, status all of these kinds of things. In our society we've created hundreds of jobs invested in maintaining our facade as an adult. When we drop all of that and become childlike, everybody around us is totally confused. [01:27:58.07]

6.5. Having no investment in the outcome: an example of AJ and Mary's experience with the media

I remember a time when we had Channel 7 come and stay with us for a couple of days. These were the guys who finished up doing the Today Tonight show that lied about us the entire time pretty much. Anyway they came along and I said to them, "Look before you film I want to have a copy of everything that you film." They agreed with that before they began filming and I knew even in that moment that they would not do it. But I trusted their agreement, so I trusted them even though I knew, based on their emotional condition, that I could feel from them that they probably wouldn't do that.

Then we engaged the process and I remember sitting down out the front of our house and doing an interview with one of them and I said to him, "You know I am giving you an opportunity right now to act more lovingly." He's a minister. He was doing an interview with me and he's a minister of the Uniting Church, I think it was the Uniting Church, and he's also a member of the media, an interesting combination. He was asking me a series of questions and I said, "Right now I'm giving you an opportunity," and he said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well I'm giving you an opportunity to prove what your soul is like because I'm telling you everything about me and you can go away and totally lie or you can tell the truth and I'm giving you that opportunity, right now I'm giving you that opportunity." [01:29:35.15]

So in that state I was childlike. I had no investment in the outcome. I could still love the man. Now as it happens they took that opportunity and instead of presenting anything honest, they completely manipulated everything into being completely dishonest. For example we have no fences around our property, myself and Mary's property. Two of our front fences and our side fence have all been taken down. The reason why we took them down was because there are occasional sugar gliders that were landing in the barbed wire fences and so we just took down all of our fences around our property. We live in a farming community so that's pretty unusual. Instead of putting in fences, we're taking out the fences. [01:30:24.02]

And they took a photograph of a barbed wire fence and called it our compound. These were two guys who lived with us for two days who we fed; we prepared meals for them all throughout that time. This gives you an indication of their decision making in their soul? But now if they were childlike, they would have just been curious, open, transparent, they wouldn't be trying to have an investment in the outcome. But you see when they began the interview with us, they already had an investment, they already had the angle all decided. They already had it all set down and so they weren't in a childlike mode straight away. [01:31:10.11]

But they were interacting with a person who's in a childlike mode all the time which is very confusing actually for them. And so quite often they'd say, "Well, what's the angle?" and I'd say, "What angle? There's no angle." They asked me about what did I receive donations wise? So I told them exactly the donations that we received on that particular weekend that they were with us. And then I told them what we spent it on because we actually spent more money that weekend, as sometimes I do, then we actually got in as donations. [01:31:50.06]

And I realised that they can edit this and edit that and chop this, chop that, put this together and make it sound like I'm saying something completely different and that's okay if I have no investment, that's okay. All that is to me is a demonstration of their lack of love. [01:32:10.23]

So I said to this minister, "You are proving not only to me but also to the world, because you're doing something that's public that's probably being shown to the world, you're going to prove whether you're loving or not to everybody. You're going to prove whether you're truthful or not to everybody through this process. And because I love you I'm giving you the opportunity to make the choice. So what choice are you going to make?" is what I asked him. [01:32:49.06]

Mary: I am just reflecting on the 6 things, the boxes on the board. I was involved in that experience as well and I took the same approach as you. I was very open and honest and I didn't hide anything about us or even about what I felt from them and what I felt their desires were. [01:33:12.00]

So we even told them what we felt their desires were in the process.

6.5.1. We feel pain when we have an investment in the outcome

Mary: Yeah, I felt, "You're not going to paint me to be a rational human being are you? You're going to make me look like a nut job," and they didn't really even deny that. However, I was just reflecting on my emotions and love because when that went to air, I can't say I had no investment; I felt pain. I felt pain that people were lying about us so how do I then discern, grow in love? Obviously it wasn't the truth that I was completely childlike with them. [01:33:46.20]

So these are the domain of pain aren't they? These emotions here.

Mary: But sometimes the first one (1) too feels painful to me. (Mary refers to point 1 on the whiteboard - requiring experimentation)

Yes this can also be a painful process because of course we can make mistakes and sometimes we can feel the mistakes as pain. This can also be a painful process too where we actually take an intellectual decision, experiment with it, experiment in the wrong direction and in the end; end up with a bit of pain. Can you see you've got to have no investment on whether you're going to have pain or not. [01:34:16.22]

Mary: Yep, so and that's what I guess I had the intellectual thought of what would love do in this situation. So I was guided by that and I...

So you tried to be that?

Mary: Yes.

But weren't always that if you're honest? [01:34:29.16]

Mary: I wasn't always that. At times I felt quite confronted but I endeavoured to use my intellect to follow the loving path and obviously it wasn't emotional because I wouldn't have become defensive or hurt or whatever. So then that's using my intellect to act in harmony with love? [01:34:50.14]

And the beauty of doing that is, that it brought up emotions and it demonstrated to you all of the emotions inside of you that were out of harmony with love. So for example the emotion about investment in people's opinion, what would you call that? [01:35:09.04]

Mary: Approval, wanting approval.

Approval... emotions of wanting approval from the world and acceptance.

Mary: Injustice. It brought up injustice.

Injustice.

Mary: It also brought up a whole process where I questioned myself where so many people... [01:35:26.06]

So, you've doubted yourself. Doubt of self but that's more of a fear about...

Mary: Well, yeah it exposed fears in me, I suppose.

Yep... all sorts of things.

So the beauty of engaging this process intellectually, acting like lovingly though you're just trying to initially, is that eventually it exposes the emotions here, the painful emotions, that were out of harmony with love anyway, which is the beauty of the process. Every process has this power. [01:35:54.20]

Mary: And that way, now in this moment, I feel more in the emotional place of acting lovingly, with more trust.

Yes and you're getting to be more here aren't you? (AJ indicates to point 1 on the emotional side of the whiteboard – experimenting with emotions). More where you're prepared to feel pain and you're prepared to experiment. You're prepared to make mistakes; you're prepared to look bad if it means even looking bad and so forth, which is a part of that process. [01:36:32.26]

Participant: I actually made a point of looking at that on YouTube because I met a family member, and towards the end I could actually see that the reverend was very invested in the outcome. I tried very hard to look at this openly as a new Divine Path person and they did say a lot of things that were unflattering and I intuited to be untrue because they didn't compute with anything that I felt or heard watching your DVD's, which is the only way I'd met you prior to today. But I did feel particularly at the end when you invited this person to come back and see you again in say ten years or earlier and he sort of guffawed and said, "Not likely!" He really did himself a disservice because that made it very clear that he was biased.

Yeah! And the sad thing is that in ten years time he's going to desperately want to talk to me and he's going to have to get over that emotion unfortunately of how much he ridiculed the idea ten years earlier, and to even do it publicly. [01:38:17.12]

6.5.2. Engaging interactions with love exposes our error

And yes I feel with every interaction we have the opportunity to learn more about love in ourselves with every single interaction. And the beauty of engaging any interaction with this kind of attitude is that eventually it will expose our own pains and that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing to expose your own pain. It's a good thing to expose your own pain because once it's exposed you can release it. Once you can release it you no longer carry it around. It no longer affects the rest of your life. So it's very important that your own pain is eventually exposed. [01:38:50.09]

And it also opens you up more to this idea that you can experiment. You can start going through not only just intellectually experiments but you can experiment with your emotions. Not just with your thoughts. Most of us are very, very unhappy about experimenting with our emotions. We want every emotion to be happy, right? When it's not happy we're very unhappy and we don't want to experiment with that feeling either. We don't want to feel that feeling or experiment with that. [01:39:21.19]

We're usually a bit happier to experiment with thoughts. You know that's why scientists are completely happy to go through the experimentation process with their thoughts? They're usually happier to do that. When it comes to experimenting here with our emotions, that's where we're normally very, very blocked. [01:39:43.20]

Participant: AJ since listening to you or listening to your teachings, I tried to apply your concepts to my own life as my experiment and I can see with one and three I can see where certainly that applies to my life but I'm trying to get a sense of whether I've ever experienced the middle grid. [01:39:43.20]

This area here? (AJ indicates to emotional and intellectual point 2 on the whiteboard)

Participant: Yeah, that area there.

Yeah it's the very difficult area.

Participant: There are times where I feel an emotion that seems to arise spontaneously and on the heels of that emotion there is a thought that I feel is a truth. I guess some people call it an "Aha" moment but it seems to be deeper than that. So I just want to know is that what you mean. Is that an example of that middle area? Just so I can recognise it again if it ever happens. [01:40:40.01]

6.6. Discovering Absolute Truth emotionally through experimentation

Yes. What happens initially, when we go through this process of opening ourselves up and becoming childlike again, is that we generally have only moments in time where we have these things happen. Short moments in time, where they might last a few minutes, sometimes even just a few seconds initially, yeah? And we need to recognise them for what they are. We need to recognise them as moments where our soul has embraced a truth and we've not only thought it but we've also felt it, as a truth and these moments are very, very important to our future development, in fact. They are like building blocks to the rest of our foundation. [01:41:22.07]

What happens as you progress is there is generally a cycle in terms of what things happen. Initially we start off in our progression thinking we know everything and actually knowing nothing. That's where we generally start. So we think we know everything and we actually know very little, is where we start. [01:41:44.17]

Then what happens is those two points slowly converge and usually what happens is the thinking we know everything eventually comes down into realising that we know nothing or very little. That is what I call a very special moment actually. It's a moment now where we've learnt to be far more humble in terms of recognising our true self.

Now we will start to go through processes which involve both our intellect and our emotions, which cause us to analyse this condition and work upon it if we desire to work upon it. So it's one thing to know that you know nothing quite another thing to desire to know everything. [01:42:24.02]

So we can know everything like I've stated, but we have to do a number of different things to do that. Like connection with God is one of those important things, connection with our selves. We need to be connected with our emotions and our intellect at the same time. There are a number of things that we need to do. [01:42:42.04]

And that is a growing proposition. We can't expect it to all happen instantly and many of us do expect this. We go, "AJ says if we feel this emotion, all of a sudden I'll know this thing." And the reality is that is true, but it's not true that you'll know the whole world of things that you need to know in a moment, that kind of thing does not actually ever occur.

So what we need to do is grow in our knowledge of ourselves, of God and of the universe around us. Now that process is going to involve experimenting. It's going to involve mistakes. It's going to involve some pain. It's going to involve confrontation with the world as we know it because most of the people in the world don't want us to do that and so we're going to have confrontation occurring as well. All of these different things will occur. [01:43:41.08]

6.7. Using our intellect to recognise emotions out of harmony with love

Mary: So really in the second box in the second column, the "emotions that are harmonious with love must always be felt as truth," that's the thing that's going to occur once we've been through all the other boxes pretty much isn't it? [01:43:53.27]

Yes.

Mary: So, like with Jane with her issues about God reliance say...

With the money issue?

Mary: Yeah. So she has to be very honest about what... like many times intellectually we think it's loving to work, but we kind of crush our souls emotionally. [01:44:14.08]

And that's not loving. So I agree it is loving to work, but I can't agree that it's loving to work in a job you hate. [01:44:21.28]

Mary: Yep, so then we go over to the emotions that feel painful and we go, "Okay there must be something..." It seems like a big feedback loop for me. [01:44:29.17]

It is.

Mary: So we feedback and we go, "Okay I need to modify this intellectual thought that I should be doing this. So what would love be doing?" [01:44:37.04]

So love would be embracing a job that I love.

Mary: Yeah.

So what I would do is give up the job that I hate and immediately not put it off, embrace the job I love and see what happens. [01:44:49.11]

Mary: Yeah and so then I go into the emotions that I'm not sure of the answer but I feel that God will probably provide for me if He created me with this unique soul for my passion. [01:44:58.29]

So that's a thought.

Mary: That's a thought, yep.

So that's a possibility only because I haven't yet known it as a truth. So I embrace the process, I become open and transparent through all of these things.

Mary: Become very afraid...

Yes and that's a part of the experiment. The part of the experiment is to bring up all of your fear and bring up all of your rage and your anger and your sadness. [01:45:17.22]

Mary: But then I would go to that box and go, "Hang on this emotion is not harmonious with love, so I shouldn't do what it says, I should let my intellect...?" [01:45:29.10]

Yeah, so the emotion might be you embrace the job and two weeks after embracing this new job that you love you've got no money. So what's the emotion? [01:45:40.25]

Mary: Terror.

It begins with fear doesn't it? So a fear based emotion. So I know the fear is not love. Fear is not love and I know that my fear is not love, so what do I do? I continue to embrace the job and feel my fear. So, because remember I said any emotion that is out of harmony with love, fear is one of those emotions, needs to be released and the only way you can release it... and we can talk more about this as we go... but the only way we can release it is by feeling it. So we have to actually feel the fear. But we still engage the job and what will happen is when we release the fear of having no money then we'll start getting some. [01:46:18.20]

Mary: But what I feel is that very often we get to that point. We feel afraid, we go, "My experiment didn't work, and God doesn't work like that."

Yes, we give up the experiment just when it's about to teach you something.

Mary: We go hopeless instead of fearful, yeah.

Yes. We give up the experiment at the wrong time. We need to carry the experiment fully through right the way through the emotion. [01:46:41.13]

Mary: And it seems to me we need to use our intellect to... because emotionally nothing...

Emotionally inside we're screaming at ourselves going, "Stop, stop this insanity, stop, stop!" Emotionally that's what we're doing, yes? [01:46:58.09]

Mary: So if we use our intellect to...

But intellectually we go, "No, no, no." We're looking at the emotion, we go, "that's an emotion out of harmony with love because its fear and I know that anything that's out of harmony with love must be addressed and must be released." And the way I release it is by feeling it. So I have to feel it without acting upon it, without deciding to act in harmony with how ever the emotion is dictating to me to act. If I know I love the job, I stay with loving the job. [01:47:23.21]

Mary: And that to me, that's what makes it a whole network of discovering truth then. This is the synthesis you're talking about isn't it? That I need to be able to engage both sides and go, "hang on, (in box 2) I'm sure that love is like this so when I'm feeling something I have to remember it's an error." [01:47:49.27]

Yep, exactly! So what we need to do is we need to stop just responding to every emotion because many of our emotions are going to be out of harmony with love and we need to stop responding to them. We need to feel them but not respond to them. Do you understand the difference? [01:48:06.24]

Responding to them is living in them. Feeling them is just feeling them pass through you. So feel terrified, feel terrified. Let yourself feel terrified but don't change your action just because you're terrified unless you're in a life threatening situation. Don't change your action. And most of the time our fear comes up way out of harmony with what the actual environment is saying most of the time. [01:48:35.29]

6.7.1. Whenever we leave a childlike state we are in error

So we need to embrace the process and as we embrace the process, whenever we get out of harmony with a childlike state we know we're in error, straight away. As soon as we're out of harmony with a childlike state we are in error. We know we're in error and so intellectually we can go, "I know I'm in error." Emotionally you might feel, "No, damn this, no, no." Emotionally you might be saying, "No, I've got to go and get a job, I've got to go and get a job. I have to do it; I have to do it." That's emotionally what's screaming at you but intellectually you can still observe that emotion and go, "Yeah, yeah, you're just in error still," because once you release this emotion this panic will be gone from you. This panic and terror will be gone. [01:49:20.26]

Mary: So what about if you have the opposite injury which is, "No I don't think that I should have to work. I've grown up in a family where a lot of things are done for me and I feel I'm entitled to expect that."

So you experiment with that. You sit home on your bum and you don't work.

Mary: There's no terror, there's just kicking back.

I'm just kicking back, relaxing and eventually my house gets taken away from me, my car gets taken away from me. I can't go anywhere, I can't do anything. Everything's taken away from me and I'm sitting there and I'll be still pondering, "No I still feel I'm in harmony with love." Obviously not, so... [01:49:54.24]

Mary: Well by then you're probably getting angry aren't you?

Exactly! By then you're getting angry, the expectations are coming up, the demand that society meets your addictions comes up and so by then you're already starting to address some of the reasons why you sat on your backside doing nothing. But can you see the way we've got to be willing to experiment? So that's the important thing. [01:50:22.13]

6.7.2. We need to recognise the extent of our fear and anger in order to change

Participant: I'm getting a lot of this intellectually and I realise that I live, breathe, eat, sleep anger and fear apart from a few little "Aha" moments where I think, "Yep, I've done a tiny, tiny little bit of love." And intellectually I know that the process... [01:50:43.02]

Can I just stop you there? So you said you eat, sleep, and breathe anger and fear? Before you go on with the next part, this is a very good state because remember you started off... [01:50:57.14]

Participant: It doesn't feel good.

It doesn't feel good but it is a very good state. Remember you started off believing you had no fear and you had no anger? And now at least you know the truth and that is I know anger and fear dictates a lot of my life that is a truth, and knowing that truth is very, very powerful because now you have the ability to change. If you didn't know that truth, you would never change. [01:51:24.01]

So you're at the stage now where I feel... you know I talk about the converging points. There was a point of what we believe, and then there's a point of what we actually are, what is real or actual. And what's happened is those two points now, for you, have started to converge. This is progress. This is called progress. [01:51:50.22]

As we progress our beliefs start to converge with the actual truth

Unfortunately though, the world doesn't view it as progress, so everybody else judges that as a lack of progress. But no, this is progress. This is true progress because now we've come to terms with what really drives us and this is wonderful, Elvira. You need to see it as wonderful. [01:52:12.12]

Participant: Yeah, I will after I've forged through it.

You will after you've gone through the emotion of it, yes. So let's proceed with your question. [01:52:18.15]

Participant: The thing is intellectually I also understand that I've done some processing and I know it works and I've tried to do anger and I injure myself every time. [01:52:34.01]

Yes.

Participant: And a lot of it's been coming up for me and I'm sitting in it and I think, "What's stopping you? Why aren't you...?" I know the process so I know what to do and... [01:52:48.14]

It's a very good question, "What's stopping you?" So let's answer it.

To process any emotion we need to understand its dynamics. In other words how it gets created. If we understand how it gets created then we have a chance to process it. So let's look at all of our emotions and how they get created. [01:53:39.04]

7. How emotions get created

During our childhood, grief is a fairly common emotion because any time that our parents suppress us we will experience some feelings of not being loved, and any time our parents go into rage or anger or fear, we will feel the feelings of not being loved. [01:54:06.12]

Now because we feel those feelings of not being loved, every single time there'll be some pain because whenever we're not loved, pain is always an associated emotion. So, underlying everything is an underlying grief that we weren't loved somehow. That starts everything. But what happens is that we were taught to suppress our grief, usually by being punished. So for most of us we were punished in some way whenever we experienced grief. So usually we got a belting or we were told to shut up. There was anger. Or often it was a combination of anger and a belting whenever a child has a good cry that is generally the result. [01:54:50.08]

So the next layer of emotions that we learn to live through is fear based emotions. Then what we do is we don't like feeling fear because fear is a terrible feeling to feel. It's one of the most difficult emotions literally for most people to feel. And so what we do is we enter into addictions in order to avoid the fear. [01:55:25.21]

So now we've got a layer of addictions that are inside of us, and the addictions can be physical. So in other words they can be drinking, smoking, drugs, sex or whatever. It can be emotional addictions and emotional addictions are things like, "I'll do this for you if you do that for me." You want other people to approve of you, to think that you're good, to be accepted, to be cared for and there are all these addictions. We just have a long list of emotional addictions. [01:56:02.06]

We also have some spiritual addictions actually, many of us. Sometimes we're addicted to not believing in God at all, sometimes we're addicted to believing in God but a God of punishment and therefore we create a whole lot of religious expectations as a result. So these are all addictions. [01:56:21.06]

Now when any of our addictions do not get met, the initial response is anger. So anger is the layer above our addictions. So understand that every time you're feeling your anger it's because you're refusing to feel your addictions. [01:56:51.24]

Participant: I get the theory of it and I sit there telling myself and watch myself when somebody hasn't met my addition and I get angry at them. "Right it's my addiction, why is this? Now I'm feeling angry, go and kick something." So I do my back in and... [01:57:08.23]

Are you prepared to feel your addiction? You see these are all feelings. If I can just explain, these are all feelings yes? Feelings or emotions, all of these, they're all feelings. To get to the next layer of feelings you have to be prepared to feel the layer that blocks you. So if I'm in anger, I need to be prepared instead to feel my fear and this is where you're struggling because you're not always prepared to feel your fears. [01:57:50.28]

Participant: I felt a lot of them, I think, or am I still doing spirit fears?

Well no, no I feel you're starting to get into this process. The beauty of what you've done up to now is you had what you've believed you were like and what was real. Now you've got to the point where you recognise, "Wow I'm just full of fears. Those fears cause me to be angry." [01:58:13.28]

Now understand though the fears don't cause you to be angry. It's your unwillingness to feel them that causes you to be angry.

Participant: So when I'm trying to be angry and I get really tired or I hurt myself or do something else, it's because I'm not willing to feel the fear? [01:58:39.27]

Yes, you want the addiction met rather than feeling the fear that the addiction covers, to actually feel it. So, most of our addictions are related to feelings of not being loved, not being wanted, not being accepted, not being approved of and so forth. [01:58:57.09]

Participant: That pretty much covers them.

Yep, and what we do is we set up our addictions to meet all of those fears. So our addictions are, if I have an interaction with you, I can't confront you because if I confront you, you don't feel that's approval and therefore it's not meeting one of your addictions and therefore it's triggering a fear. And then you don't like your fear being triggered of not being approved of and so then you revert to anger. There's a cycle that goes on there. [01:59:26.23]

And if we understand that dynamic, initially we have to understand it with our mind like you've done. Now the step you're taking is to going into understanding it emotionally. Now that requires you to actually feel the emotion. That's the part that's hard. That's the part that everybody gets stuck on. Everybody! Not just Elvira, right? Every single person I've ever known whose ever come across the Divine Love Path gets stuck at the point of feeling their fears. [01:59:57.17]

Participant: I want to know what to do about it.

Well that's also a fear.

Participant: Yeah, I'm still looking for my manual.

7.1. Learning to feel as children feel

What does the child do? The child just feels it without the angle, without wanting to understand what it has to feel. The child just goes ahead and feels it, chooses to feel it. And this is one of the constructs that we have as an adult that we believe we have to understand it before we can feel it. The child doesn't understand it yet it feels it and releases it, pretty much straight away. [02:00:30.12]

So there's a process we need to get back to. So what you're doing is going through a process of releasing this adult way of dealing with problems and getting back to the childlike way which is actually a very rapid way of dealing with problems. Now I'm not suggesting that all children are loving, because that is certainly not true. What I am suggesting is the way they handle emotions is the fastest way generally to releasing them. Even their unloving ones! [02:01:00.24]

7.1.1. An example of disciplining a disruptive child

Now I've given you examples of this before where I've seen a child come up and hit somebody. I'll give you an example that just happened probably four weeks ago. We were at a seminar and this child just ran riot in the seminar, distracting everybody. His mother just sat there doing nothing at all. Just sat there watching the riot, she was the only person probably who could concentrate because she's so used to the riot. Everybody else is always distracted, distracted, distracted and then we showed a movie and he was back and forth, back and forth, screaming and yelling through the movie and it was very interruptive to the whole process. [02:01:54.29]

The child obviously was not being very loving, right? So I went to talk with both her and him after the seminar and she asked me how do I handle this... she recognised that the child's behaviour was unloving. She could also see her own behaviour was unloving because she didn't take the child out while it was disturbing so many people. So she could see her own behaviour was unloving, so I talked to her about that. And then she asked me the question, "How would you deal with the child?" I said it's very simple and I got the little lad and all I did was squatted down and just held him to my body and didn't allow him to move. [02:02:42.24]

How many seconds to you think it took before he was screaming? It took about two seconds and he was screaming. And then while he was screaming I was talking to his mum. I was saying, "You see your child does not like being restricted. He doesn't even like being restricted in a loving manner. He doesn't like being told that he can't do something. He likes being unloving." I said, "Now watch what happens." I let him go. He went up and punched his mother as hard as he could in the leg, as soon as I let him go and she watched that occur and did nothing. Did nothing! [02:03:57.13]

And so I firstly addressed that, that she did nothing and then I grabbed him again and held him again and said to him, "You can't punch your mother, any time, and I'm going to hold you here until you stop screaming about it," because he wanted to go up and punch her again. So I just held him, held him. [02:03:57.13]

It was outside of a public place and she became so embarrassed because I held him for about five minutes only, everybody inside the hall heard him because he was just screaming his lungs out and if it was me, I would have just stayed holding him and holding him and holding him until he began to cry. Properly cry like a grieving cry. Because what he had to do was he had to go through his addiction not getting met and when you go through your addiction not getting met, you revert to anger and then you drop down into your fear and then you'll get eventually to your grief as a feeling.

Now I've done that with other children and its taken one and a half to two and a half hours generally of holding them, which requires a lot of love on your part to do that without feeling bad, without feeling guilty, and eventually they've dropped into their grief. After they've dropped into that grief, they never do the same thing again, ever. Never do it again unless the parent reinfects them with the same emotion. They'll never do it again. [02:05:10.24]

Now most parents are unwilling to do that with their child and you know why? Because they're unwilling to do it with themselves! What do I mean by that? [02:05:23.01]

7.2. We have to confront our addictions and feel our fears to become loving

Most of us have all of these addictions in play in our life and we're totally unwilling to accept them not being met. Totally unwilling! We want every single addiction in our entire life to be met. That's our problem! And we think we should be able to get away with that and we can't. We're not going to be able to get away with that. If we want to become loving, we're not going to be able to get away with that because a lot of our addictions are unloving both to ourselves and to other people. [02:05:55.08]

So what we're going to need to do is confront our addictions. When we confront them, we will feel anger. You will feel anger. Initially when you first confront them you'll feel like anger is the only thing you've ever felt. It's the feeling that you feel. You go through this period of anger which lasts... it can last weeks or months and I've seen it last years for some people where they've been just angry, angry, angry, angry and then recognising they're angry and seeing that the addiction's not getting met. [02:06:24.12]

If you're willing, if you have a willingness, to face your fear, you will be a lot less angry if you have a willingness to face your fear. But a lot of people have very little willingness initially to face their fears. [02:06:40.07]

Participant: So what you're saying is that I'm making a choice not to feel my fear?

Our will determines what emotions we choose to feel

Yes. It's a choice. Spot on. It's a very good intellectual realisation to have Elvira. The key is to translate that now into an emotional realisation into, "Wow, if I choose to feel my fear, then I'll never get angry again." That's a pretty amazing thing when you think about it isn't it? That if I actually choose to feel all of my fears. [02:07:17.27]

Participant: How do I make that choice emotionally? Like intellectually I've made the choice, emotionally clearly I don't want to do it. [02:07:26.10]

Yes, and that's the case for most people. So what you need to do is look at the addictions and why you want them fulfilled. So Mary you want to comment? Mary's going through the same process, Elvira, so it would be good for her to comment. [02:07:42.14]

7.3. Working through addictions intellectually and emotionally

Mary: Yeah, I feel there's a space where you feel the addiction. It's like initially it feels like whenever the addiction isn't met, I'm in anger automatically my soul is just still so decidedly avoiding the fear that I just jump straight to anger. But it feels like there's a space where I can feel my addiction. Like emotionally feel what is going on. [02:08:07.01]

You could liken it to a person who's given up smoking and they badly want to go and buy another pack. You know that feeling that they have. Or a person who's giving up drugs, or a person who's giving up drinking and they badly want the drink and they're pounding around the house, looking for the cupboard that's got the spare bottle or they're pounding around the house looking through the rubbish to find the butt that's half smoked. [02:08:32.00]

Now in that space, that's what we're like emotionally. We're the same as that emotionally, where we're pounding around trying to get our addiction met. What we've got to do is be observant enough to see, "What am I doing? I'm looking through a rubbish bin for a cigarette. What am I doing to myself here?" Like you've got to see that place and decide to not take the addictive action and instead feel what you're afraid of, instead of taking the addictive action. And that takes a lot of self observation to do that. [02:09:10.29]

Mary: Yeah and it feels emotional too. Like I've done that intellectually and prevented a lot of my addictions but my soul's still driving things. So it feels like there's an emotional place I get to where emotionally I feel like, "Oh I really want this emotion from someone. I really want this thing." And it's like an emotional realisation that that's not loving or something and then my fear kind of arrives. [02:09:38.23]

Because a lot of times when we're getting the addiction met and we notice it we go, "Wow, I'm doing that!" There's this point of recognition generally where we go, "Wow, look what I've just done with my son, my daughter, my mother, my father, my wife, my husband," whatever it is who's close to us, my workmate, my friend or whatever. "Look what I just did. That was just totally driven by the fact that I want to avoid a fear and when they didn't give me what I wanted back, I just feel angry with him." Straight away, that tells me that I still want my addiction met. [02:10:12.00]

So what I do is I acknowledge that. I need to acknowledge that I want this addiction met. Once I've acknowledged that I want the addiction met, now I have the opportunity to examine the fear that's underneath it. [02:10:26.23]

Now firstly, intellectually, I'll examine the fear but remember that was only one half of the equation. We've got to get to the other half of the equation which is emotionally feeling the fear. That's when most people throw their hands up in the air and they want to give up. They want to throw in the towel as the saying goes. [02:10:52.24]

We've got to get beyond that point and into the point of actually feeling the emotion. Once you feel the emotion you'll be surprised how rapidly you can work your way through the emotion. But it will feel distressing because every error based emotion is distressing to feel and release. Because you feel like you're giving up something that's part of you and it is a part of you. It's been a part of you for how long have you been alive now, Elvira? Fifty years. So it's been a part of you for fifty years. [02:11:24.10]

A lot of these emotions were created within the first seven years of your existence and the rest of the time we've been living in them. And of course after forty three years of living in them, they're going to feel like they are just a part of our very nature. And when we give them up, it feels like a part of us is getting torn out of us and it's going to feel painful. But once it's gone, now we will never, ever, ever even have the emotion to respond to inside of us. So anger cannot come up because the fear has gone and we've dealt with the grief on that particular issue. So the anger on that particular issue just does not arise any more. [02:12:14.15]

So there are issues years ago I used to get very angry about and now no anger at all comes up in the same situation. And the reason why is once you've dealt with the emotion and released the emotion, there's no need for anger anymore because there's no addiction anymore involved in the process. You're not feeling an addiction anymore that you badly want to get fulfilled. [02:12:41.26]

So the key is to be patient with yourself. Which is something that your parents told you not to be and you need to be patient with this process. So yes, you've spent a lot of time learning about the psychology of it, or should I call it the intellectual part of it, now you're actually putting it into practice. Putting it into practice is much more difficult than learning about it intellectually. But the reality is that until you put it into practice you won't really understand it either. So that's also a reality. [02:13:25.20]

Now what we do with this, we need to put the two things together now of what we've discussed with this particular flow of emotion and compare it with those two columns that we created earlier about what we do with our intellect in terms of determining truth and what we do with our emotions in terms of determining truth. And come up with some practical examples and situations where we can reflect upon what would we do in these practical examples. [02:13:57.25]

Now the problem with any practical example is that every one of them is individual in nature and so therefore cannot be applied right across the board to every single thing. So please remember that when we come up with these practical examples. Go back to the underlying theory if you like which is the two columns, the intellectual side, those three points that we raised on the intellectual side, the three points that we raised on the emotional side. This is the general level of emotion that's in us, almost every emotion that we've got that's out of harmony with love can be fit into one of these areas of emotions. And so all we need to do is understand the relationship between these types of emotions, what's going on in our intellect and what's going on in our emotional self, and we'll have a great way of determining the truth of our life. Not only the truth of our life but also the truth about the universe in the process.

Logic, Emotions and Truth: Part 2

8. Emotional effects of living in addictions

Participant: AJ, I'm just getting a feeling that I'm pretty well living my whole life in addictions and the courage it takes to even recognise them, and then to act differently to how I've been used to acting. [00:01:54.28]

Yes when you're living in your addictions, there are generally two primary emotions you experience on a day-to-day basis. One is what you would classify as a level of happiness because your addictions are getting met, and when your addictions are getting met you usually feel good. [00:02:17.24]

And then the other one is a severe degree of unhappiness, and you usually cycle between those two states. When your addictions get met you're happy, when your addictions don't get met, you're unhappy, and usually along with unhappy, angry, frustrated, annoyed and so forth. [00:02:48.19]

And the reality is most people on the planet live their life in addictions, particularly in the Western world, because in the Western world we have the means to actually satisfy our addictions. In many other parts of the world there are not the means to satisfy your addictions very much at all and so the addiction list in the Western world is very, very long. It can often go over many pages when you start writing it down, whereas the addiction list somewhere in the third world is often very short because they don't have the means to satisfy their addictions. [00:03:24.04]

Now because of this cycle, we have this cycle of going between happiness unhappiness, happiness unhappiness, for many people what happens is every time they feel an emotion of unhappiness, they create an action that fixes the unhappiness.

8.1. Removing people from our lives indicates we're in addiction

So let's say you don't like Mary and Mary is the source of your unhappiness. So what you do then is you just blot her from your life. You don't see her, you don't spend any time with her, you don't phone her, and you make sure she can't phone you. You put a bar on your phone to Mary, you put a bar on your email to Mary, you put a bar on your Facebook to Mary, and basically you've cut the source of your unhappiness out of your life. That still indicates you're in heavy addiction.

And so what happens is that people take the action to cut somebody out of their life, to prevent them from affecting their life and the action then, the response to that is another layer of happiness. "Oh, at least that person's out of my life now. I can forget about them and I can get on with my own life." [00:04:36.27]

And so the majority of people find themselves living in this cycle of happiness unhappiness, happiness unhappiness, where what they're doing is they're slowly releasing all of their unhappiness creators by taking some action that stops them from being involved in their own life. So they take an action, get rid of a little bit of the unhappiness, take another action; get rid of another person who was causing their unhappiness, take another action; get rid of another one and eventually they end up with no unhappiness in their life. Isn't it wonderful? I have a wonderful life free of any frustration and annoyance and everything. [00:05:14.07]

But of course the Law of Attraction is still at work so when you're driving your car down the freeway now, you still have your frustration and you still have your annoyance and you still have some degree of unhappiness. Because the reality is unless you become a hermit, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to cut every unhappiness source out of your life. But the majority of people, particularly in the Western world, we manage through the use of our money, the use of our time, the use of all the resources at our fingertips and so forth, we manage to create a life that's relatively, and put in quotations, "happy" because most of our addictions are getting met. [00:06:01.27]

It takes a lot of sincere personal analysis to realise that that's what is going on and unfortunately most people who are now in that place where they're getting most of their addictions met, they're not that happy about self analysis either. Because self analysis causes them to go, "Maybe I haven't got everything figured out," and that feels bad and then there's unhappiness. So they'd much rather believe that they're in a state of happiness than any other state. So they'd much rather not analyse themselves either very much. [00:06:39.18]

And so most of us have got to the point where the majority of our life is now happy and our relationship that we currently live in is relatively happy and our day-to-day work environment is relatively happy because we've managed to rub out all the sources of unhappiness and that is not going to really cause us to grow in love, none of that will cause us to grow in love. [00:07:07.10]

When you have grown in love, you don't prevent sources of unhappiness from being involved in your life and yet you can still remain happy. So what would cause most people to become unhappy doesn't affect you at all once you've grown in love. And you don't need any resources to prevent other people from being in your life. You don't need to bar them from your life, prevent them from your life in any way. [00:07:38.23]

And so this is the problem that many of us feel. We get to this point where we actually love living here (AJ indicating to "addictions" on the whiteboard). We "love" that and I put love in quotations as well because it's a very facade life but we love it because a lot of our addictions are getting met and the reason why we love it so much is that none of our fears need to be confronted very much in our life. [00:08:15.25]

Participant: So would it be beneficial to put ourselves in a situation where we need to confront our fears?

Well firstly I would have a look at how much I love my addictions, firstly, I would examine what they were actually doing and what they were actually covering. Like you can use your mind very positively examining your life and you can examine your life quite a lot. But in the end this place, this addictive place, is never going to get you close to God and it's never going to get you close to yourself and you need at some point to see that before you'll want to change it, there has to be a reason to change. [00:08:59.28]

For many of us we don't have much of a reason to change because we don't believe that we can have a relationship with God and we don't believe that we can ever really know ourselves very well or actually be happy if we really know ourselves. And so what we do is we spend a lot of our life avoiding a relationship with God, avoiding a relationship with ourselves and as a result of that, we "love" this place because this addictive place is what keeps us there; it helps us stay there. [00:09:30.05]

8.2. Reasons to give up our addictions: love of God, love of self and love of truth

To actually get deeper into these emotions, we're going to have to have two loves that drive us a bit more than anything else. Two loves. The first love that will drive us, will help us through everything, is our love of God. Now of course if you have no love of God to begin it makes that one very difficult. [00:09:59.00]

The second love is the love that most people start with and that is having a deeper love of self. I'm not saying this in a narcissistic manner, but rather having an honouring of your true nature and feelings rather than an honouring of the facade that you live in. So in other words, I want to discover my true self and be that person rather than being the person that is happy for everybody else, rather than being the person that everybody else wants me to be. [00:10:36.26]

Now at some point in our future, every single emotion that we experience will be challenged and you'll want to give up dealing with some of these emotions. They are so intense to address, they are so difficult to address and they're so powerful emotionally to address and they take time to address, that a love of something needs to drive you. And if you don't have a love of God or a love of self, you could also focus then, if you wished, on a love of truth, and connect with the desire for truth inside of you, because most people do have a strong desire for truth inside of them. And when I say truth, a lot of times we have a strong desire for external truth but not a very strong one for internal truth or the truth about ourselves. But usually the love of truth does pull us along as well. And when I say a love of truth, a love to find out the truth, like that childlike experimentation to find the truth. [00:11:44.13]

Now those loves will help you overcome all fear and it will also help you experience all of your grief. If you don't have something that you love, then it's highly unlikely that you'll get through the process of releasing your addictions. And many people for that reason pass over into the spirit world and you can talk to many people in the spirit world who have yet to deal with their addictions still. They are still in the first dimension of the spirit world, still in darkness, still having a difficult life in the spirit world because they still have yet to address their addictions. [00:12:23.17]

8.2.1. Anger indicates our addiction is not being met

So for most people when they're beginning, this place of finding God and finding yourself, the addictions are a great place to start, because they tell you everything about your fears, and anger is your guide to your fears. In other words, every time you're getting angry it's an addiction that you want met that's not being met and the only reason why you're angry is because you're afraid of something not being met. So it tells you immediately. [00:12:55.09]

So the beauty of focussing on your addictions and working your way through them whether they are physical, emotional or spiritual in nature, it doesn't matter what type of addictions they are, the beauty of focussing on them is that you can grow through that process a lot more rapidly than if you try to deal with your fears, or you try to deal with your grief. Because all of your addictions are about your fears and all of your fears are about your grief. So once you address your addictions, your fears will be exposed to you and that's the beauty of the process. [00:13:33.11]

8.2.2. Gender differences in processing emotions

Now of course for many women, fear is worse than grief to feel. So many of you ladies will probably attest to that; that when you come up against fear you feel terrified and you just feel like you can't feel it. But when it comes to grief, you can feel like you can get into your grief. But the problem is the emotion of fear covers the emotion of grief. So you are never going to experience grief completely until you experience the fear completely. So it's very important for you to realise that if you don't address the fear, then not all of the grief will come out of you. [00:14:15.29]

Now for many men fear is not as much of a problem because many men have been taught to challenge their fears on a day-to-day basis, and for that reason for many men... and I'm not saying all men it's just a generalisation... for many men fear is not so much of a problem but grief is a huge problem. In other words they'll do anything to avoid their grief and so many men have problems with how much grief they have inside of themselves. [00:14:46.10]

This is also a reason why men experience more heart attacks than women. In the past that's been more the case than now but men have more heart-based problems generally than women because of grief and the suppression of the grief. Women have a lot more problems in other areas of their body as a result of their fear rather than their grief and the suppression of their fears. [00:15:12.18]

And so remember every problem in your body is a reflection of the different problems or things that you're trying to shut down emotionally and often... these are again generalisations... but often you can see in women they're shutting different areas in themselves emotionally as a result and many of the areas emotionally are the parts of your body that are affected by fear. For men many of them are not so affected by fear but more affected by grief and as a result those parts of their body are being shut down quite a lot emotionally. [00:15:46.01]

So if it was me starting right at the beginning again, I would start with my addictions. Initially you're going to be fairly intellectual probably about it because we love our addictions being met so much that we can't even recognise we have them in many cases, and that's the problem. [00:16:18.21]

9. An example of learning the truth: dealing with loneliness emotions

Participant: Hi, AJ. This is just a bit about my life if that's alright and what I've been going through?

Not too much about your life because we want to focus on the question, but just give a little.

Participant: Just generally. Recently I've had an ending of a relationship and I've found I've also had a lot of felt realisations that I had a very controlling dominating mother and a father that was completely abandoning and I've realised that I've spent my entire life looking like a desperate need for love. [00:16:53.24]

From a woman in particular!

Participant: Particularly from a woman. I've felt the pain, and as much as I've looked, I've never really found it because everyone that I've been attracted to has really been there to reflect the feelings of lack of self love. [00:17:13.11]

So most of the women you've been attracted to, have been women who demonstrate a lack of love for you generally?

Participant: Yes, generally and I have been the pleasing type man, the pleasing type man sexually etc.

You do everything possible to please.

Participant: To please. And obviously there's something that happens at the beginning of the relationship where that addiction gets met and then as the relationship proceeds, I've found that the love that I would have liked or have been seeking has not ever been there. [00:17:42.18]

And that then makes you do less does it, you find? Or you do more?

Participant: This is getting to the crux of it. My mother passed away a couple of years ago and with this relationship ending, it's created an enormous amount of terror in me, fear, and a lot of grief about who was going to love me, that I will never be loved. And I've realised that with this one ending it's almost like there's no support all of a sudden because before there was always the mother in the background even though in another state. [00:18:21.17]

So can I describe to you what you've been doing? So here is yourself, Marc. And you've had your mother always alive up until a few years ago? So this is mum. And you would go and find another relationship, with a woman I gather, and when that relationship wasn't satisfying all of your emotional addictions that you needed to get met, you still had mum to go and get the rest done. Is that how it worked? [00:18:52.11]

Participant: Yes.

And to be honest that's how most people's lives work; most people's lives work like that. They have a parent, usually it's an opposite, sometimes it's the same gender parent but usually it's an opposite gender parent. So it could be mum or dad. And when our partners do not satisfy all of the emotions, instead of looking to complete this relationship and have this relationship satisfy all emotions, most people give up on that and they go, "Right, she's never going to do that so what I'll do is I'll get that one from mum. So she'll give me that one." One of them might be respect; let's say she's never going to respect me. So I get my respect from mum. So mum gives me respect. But my partner does give me approval when I do certain things. So I enter that addiction and I don't need that from mum now because I'm getting it from her. And so forth we can list lots of different emotions. [00:20:11.29]

An example of Marc, who received certain addictions met by his relationship and others by his parents

And so when mum or dad dies...

Participant: And I've got both parents have died now so...

The fallback position is gone.

Participant: Yes. So what has happened is my fallback position has gone and for the very first time in my life...

Marc is alone.

Participant: Marc is alone. In the last month or two months for the very first time in my life, that's what I'm... yeah.

How many of you are afraid of being alone? Be honest, yeah, particularly on a permanent aloneness? The best way to see whether you're afraid of being alone is to choose to spend your Christmas alone and then you'll see whether you're afraid of being alone or not. Do you understand why? Because that's the time when everybody else is getting together with somebody else. So when you're alone doing it, it's a very interesting experience. So there's this feeling of aloneness that needs to be experienced obviously. [00:21:13.25]

The reality is you're not alone.

Participant: No. This is what I'm getting at because I can see the truths but there are still these child-trapped emotions, which are still running things. So intellectually I...

So intellectually, remember the previous comments we had? Intellectually we could say number two is the truth about being whether Marc's alone or not is that Marc is not alone. He's loved by somebody. The spirit friends that you've got that interact with you on a daily basis, God Loves you, there's all this love available to you but you can't feel it. That's the problem. It can't be felt. [00:22:04.20]

So when it can't be felt; that's when this feeling kicks in of I'm all alone, I'm terrible, nobody wants me, nobody loves me. So we can tell ourselves intellectually the truth that we aren't alone or that we are loved, but it's not going to hit us emotionally Marc, until we process something. You can see that. Can I just expand a little bit of situations that also involve other people and what's going on in their life? [00:22:24.29]

When your mum or dad dies, there is also the potential that your mum and dad are now in the spirit world but Earthbound. Here they are still around you. For many people, not for yourself Marc because if it was happening for yourself you wouldn't feel so alone. But because there are blocks to the spirit world for yourself, you do feel very alone as a result of that. But they are still there and if they were Earthbound and they wanted to fulfil your addictions they would often just sit on your shoulder still giving you exactly the same emotional addictions that you were getting before. [00:23:11.16]

Parents who pass into the spirit world can still give their son, Marc, who is alone, feelings

So I know of many people who have passed who are just sitting basically right next to the person who was their son or daughter still projecting exactly the same emotion at them that they were projecting at them when they were alive and feeling that they were doing them a good deed doing so because it helps the person not feel bad about themself and so forth. [00:23:37.15]

Now once these addictions start breaking down, this feeling of aloneness, which is a huge feeling in society; the majority of people are terribly afraid of being alone. And so in the Western world often we plan our world around not being alone for any extended period of time. So we'll often go to work, but we don't want to go home to an empty house. So what do we do? We go around and visit a mate or a friend or ex-partner even; "That's better than nothing," is the feeling we have. And so we go from that person and then when they reject us or they feel like they're getting too much of us, we'll go to the football or we'll go somewhere else where we're together with a group of people and we don't have to feel alone. Or we go to a restaurant or whatever else. We do just so many things, and even a lot of our hobbies are not chosen because we love them, but because it gives us an opportunity to not be alone. [00:24:45.05]

And what we need to choose to do is to firstly feel the fear of being alone and then, once we feel the fear of being alone, allow the grief about being alone. So what you'll find is in your childhood there were many times when even your mum and dad were standing right in front of you but you actually felt alone. [00:25:09.01]

Participant: I think I felt very alone for all my childhood. It's a complete non-recognition of any emotion or... of me...

Or of you, yeah! No acknowledgement of the child, no acknowledgement of the personality. A lot of parents don't even acknowledge the personality of the child, the individual characteristics and nature of the child and so forth. They just don't acknowledge any of those things so the child grows up feeling totally alone even though the parents are right in their face all the time. And it's a feeling we need to actually feel, to release. [00:25:45.06]

Participant: And I'm okay at this second but of late it's just been continuous. And I'm happy that I've recognised I've done the list of the addictions, I know what they are, but I don't want to go to them. [00:26:01.17]

Well there are two things that need to happen.

9.1. Feeling the error-based emotion and feeling the truth-based emotion

You're doing the first, which is to feel the error-based emotion. [00:26:10.08]

Participant: Which is the fear.

No, in the end it's the grief that you are alone. Because the reality is that God is right next to you, you've got all these spirit friends near you. You're not alone even when you're physically by yourself; you're still not alone. So that is the truth but that's just an intellectual truth it's not something you feel. So the first thing is to feel that you are alone, you need to go through the feeling, which you are doing. But the second thing you're very resistive to, and many of us get very resistive about this. We need to feel the truth-based emotion. [00:26:56.01]

Participant: This is where I've been struggling. I know the truth and how do I get that? How do I get the truth in and the error out? [00:27:01.24]

Well often the truth enters as the error leaves, so sometimes it's just a matter of feeling the emotion longer. So for example if it's an emotion of being alone and you are alone all of your childhood; you felt alone all of your childhood. So let's say for Marc what age did you feel you ended your childhood? [00:27:27.25]

Participant: Maybe mid teens let's say?

Okay so let's say you were fifteen. You've got fifteen years of alone to feel. Now do you think you're going to get over that in one sitting? [00:27:40.08]

Participant: No.

Definitely not! This is the other problem we have, we are very impatient. So when we engage an experiment of feeling our emotions what do we do? We go through this process of impatience. We go, "I want to be over this, this should be over, and I've been feeling this for one week. It's too long now." But we've had fifteen years of it and now we're hoping to be over it in one week. So that's part of our problem, we want things to be finished before they're finished and being finished is a natural process that we'll need to go through. [00:28:15.15]

Participant: So what about this feeling the truth one?

Well can you see that while the error exists it's going to be hard to feel the truth? And partly you're impatient with the emotion. So you want the emotion to be over, which doesn't allow you to feel it fully. So allow yourself to feel the emotion fully, as you do that, but you'll also need to come to feel about the truth itself. So what is the actual truth? Now you're being told by me the truth but you don't believe that because if you believed that you wouldn't feel alone. [00:28:51.07]

Participant: Yes.

So it's okay to not believe these things. We need to still be open to accepting it. So we'll put that in the experiment basket.

9.2. Experimenting to discover the truth about loneliness

So the experiment is, "How do I actually get to finish up feeling the truth that I'm not alone?" The experiment would be to experiment with who is with me. Experiment with connecting with them somehow. I'm talking about God and your spirit guides who are with you every single day. Experiment with the connection there. [00:29:26.07]

Participant: I'm doing it with God. I tend to not...

You tend to not do it with your guides because you feel you're alone and this is where you're not experimenting. You're not going, "Well hang on a sec, if that's true, then I must have a guide and if I've got a guide who's sitting with me every single day of my awake life, then he must know me better than I know myself, right? And then on top of that, he must love me a lot to spend all of that time with me." So there's all that love that I'm shutting off obviously. I can experiment with that now. I might start off doing all sorts of things. I might go to a medium and ask, "Who's my guide?" And they give me all the wrong answers but I would experiment with the process until I can feel that this person's with me.

Now as I'm experimenting with this process, what's happening inside of me is I'm becoming more and more open to feeling the truth because I'm actually knowing the truth exists. You see its one thing for me to say to you you've got God all the time available to you and you've got your spirit guide all the time available to you. I can say that but it means nothing unless you can feel it. Isn't that true? [00:30:48.01]

Participant: Yes.

So it means nothing unless you feel it. Now how do you feel it? Well at the moment you're not feeling it so you've got to go through an experiment to feel it. So engage the process of experimenting with it. [00:31:01.29]

Participant: Well even the last couple of weeks, which I've really loved, there's been a desire to get to know God; really genuinely get to know God and that's wonderful. [00:31:09.15]

I would do that with God and your guides. God and your guides are a group of people who want to know you. They have seen the damage that's happened in your childhood, they understand everything about your life; they understand you very well, better than you understand yourself most of the time. And they want to get to know you; they want to help you through that process and so part of this process would be to not trust what I've just said but to experiment with it. "Who is with me? Are there these guides really? Like AJ says there are these guides but..." [00:31:43.24]

Participant: "Even can you show me you exist? Or can you do something or...?" I don't know that sort of thing.

"Give me some signs that you exist." So you could enter into a dialogue with them that would enable them to show you through a series of events that they're there. And you can ask them to engage this process with you not to alleviate your fears but rather just so that you can learn to accept the truth that people are with you who love you. [00:32:11.06]

Now what happens with most people on the New Age movement is they go, "I've got my guide, I've got a guardian. Wow that's wonderful; I don't have to feel bad." That's not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to help you accept the truth emotionally, not to avoid the grief emotionally. So in other words we want to engage this process of experimentation not primarily for the purpose of just making yourself not feel alone anymore because that's dealt with by the first thing you need to do which is to feel the error-based emotion, feel the alone feeling. You need to deal with that still but you also need to engage this second process as an experiment of feeling the truth as well. What is the truth about that? Am I actually alone? [00:33:04.26]

So when I did that, it took me five years to go through that issue, just that one issue. Of course I was working through other issues concurrently because you often do, do that but I felt alone for many, many years until I could feel the people with me and feel God was with me then I didn't feel alone anymore. Now there are still times when I feel alone but I realise that it's just a feeling I need to feel because I've already gone through the truth that there are people with me and I know them and I've talked to them and so forth. [00:33:40.22]

Participant: Because there's a lot of fear in that aloneness. I've carried on with my life like I won't survive in the world and with a sense of impending doom and that things must come to an end. That's just been horrendous.

Yeah, most of the world has those feelings. The reason why we want family so desperately is because we do not believe that we are capable of supporting ourselves and a lot of the time the reason why we believe this emotionally is because we were taught that; we were taught that we were incapable of supporting ourselves emotionally and physically and financially and so forth, without some family assisting us. [00:34:22.08]

Participant: And that's what my mother did. She basically made it that she kept me with her and disenabled me so that was what she did. [00:34:31.12]

Exactly and she did that because she believed that that's what she needed because she had the same feeling that she's totally alone without you. And so what we finish up doing is we finish up growing up with this idea and concept that without family we're dead. [00:34:48.14]

Participant: Yes, sometimes it's felt that I'm going to die.

Yeah and this is an emotion that we do need to work our way through because the reality is we have God. Without God you're dead, pretty much. But once you've got God, who else do you need? You've got the Creator of the universe; do you think you need anybody else? Not really. [00:35:09.27]

So once we understand that connection and feel that connection, now we have the ability to understand that we can never be alone. But we have to feel that because it's not going to be real inside of us until we can feel that. We can't manufacture the feeling; we've got to experiment to discover the truth of it. I'm not suggesting to you that you just believe something down pat and then just delude yourself into a false sense of an emotion. That's not what I'm suggesting at all. That's why experimentation is so important. Without the experiment you're never going to believe it yourself. You know you can have anybody tell you anything and if you do not experiment, you will never believe them. [00:35:55.15]

Participant: Until I feel it for myself.

Until you feel it you're never going to believe them.

Participant: So it's another question with regards to the fear and the grief. An awful amount of grief has come up with the relationship about the not being loved and the like, and it feels for me like the aloneness has sat under the grief of the relationship ending. So it's like I feel like I've done a lot of grief about the relationship part but the aloneness part is bringing the fear. So is it a different grief? Are they different grief? [00:36:29.23]

Yep, totally different grief because with some of your grief you've actually been feeling your addictions, your addictions to a relationship; a lot of times when we don't get addictions met... remember I said there's unhappiness as well as anger and frustration and annoyance? Unhappiness is like, quite often we can cry, but we cry about our addiction not getting met. When you start addressing the issue with mum and dad, now you're starting to address more of a causal issue associated with the true fears, and grief associated with your relationship with them. It's interesting though that you called the grief awful. Can you see what that does? [00:37:15.15]

Participant: Yes I'm resisting. I say I want the willingness to feel these causal emotions I'm still having a resistance to feeling them because I'm labelling it awful. [00:37:24.15]

It's not that your labelling, because the labelling doesn't really matter, the intellectual label is not important, it's the emotion that comes with that label. You do feel grief is awful. I feel grief is lovely. I love it when I get into my grief.

Participant: I love it when the grief's gone so it's a freeing feeling but the facing it's... [00:37:45.17]

No I love the actual experience of grief because it's a very aware place. Many of you might have noticed this already when you start feeling your grief that sometimes you become very aware of its cause and you become very aware of a lot of things around you that you weren't aware of and for that reason I feel grief is a very like "awe"- full in the sense of awe inspiring full. Full of awe rather than an awful and terrible experience and this is one of the things we need to address with our view of pain. [00:38:30.17]

9.2.1. Learning to love and embrace our grief

Our view of pain, particularly emotional pain, is very negative, particularly in Western society. If you go to some other societies the view of pain is far more accepting. Like if you go to India or you go to Africa and go through the process of observing somebody who's gone through bereavement, they'll often allow themselves to cry for twenty days, thirty days and just really cry for a long period of time until the grief is over. [00:39:05.20] Here what we do is we have a little snivel at the funeral and then we have a little snivel at home when we're by ourselves, and a little snivel again. And the trouble is that our snivels finish up being dragged out over years. I've known some people who twenty years later is the first time they actually fully grieve a bereavement that happened twenty years before.

Now if you think about it that is because of the viewpoint of grief. It's how we see grief. In Western society we see grief as a very negative emotion. What's the very first thing that a doctor says to you when you're grieving? Have you ever been to a doctor while you're grieving? It's a very interesting process. "How long have you being crying for?" If you say it's any longer than a few hours what's the next thing? [00:39:57.29]

Participant: They prescribe you an antidepressant.

They prescribe you an antidepressant, exactly, because our society cannot cope with any length of grief. This is why sales of antidepressants are so high because there is such a focus on suppressing grief, grief being the healing emotion. It's great when you get into grief because you're no longer in fear and you're no longer in addiction, you're now just feeling it and now you've got a chance to heal. So the reality is that, that's a far safer for you than any other place, if you engage that in a loving place. So I'm not suggesting you engage grief in an unloving place, which would be suicidal in its nature, and which is more to do with an addiction than grief. [00:40:42.25]

So what we need to do is address our grief, feel our grief and allow ourselves to feel it. But we also need to experiment with the truth before the truth can enter us. We cannot expect somebody to just tell us the truth and then we automatically accept it emotionally. It's impossible to do so. We need to actually personally experience it emotionally before we will personally accept it. [00:41:07.19]

Participant: Those two types of grief I got to, with the aloneness and the loss of love. Is that what they are really?

One was actually more to do with an addiction of a relationship. When you don't have a relationship, you then feel like your life's a mess because you don't have a relationship. That is more to do with the addiction which covers your fear. The fear is this terrible feeling you have, that if you're alone that nobody will ever love you, nobody ever wants you, and you're going to be worthless and useless. Underneath that is a lot of grief associated with your parents' relationship, your relationship with your mother in particular. [00:41:56.05]

Participant: Okay. So I haven't quite gone there yet. I'm still in the fear of the aloneness.

So when you go there, then a lot of the aloneness feelings will just dissipate anyway but you also need to experiment with the truth. The fact is that you've got people around you who love you, care about you, want to be a part of your life, you just can't feel them. [00:42:17.06]

Participant: Can I focus on the people and on Earth as well?

On Earth and in the spirit world! You know the people in the spirit world are great to focus on because God firstly has no emotional addictions with you; people on Earth do. Secondly if your guide is on the Divine Love Path and usually it's a high likelihood they are if you've found the Divine Love Path, then there's a high likelihood they won't feed your addictions either. So the relationship with them can be very healing in comparison to any relationship you have with anybody on Earth. [00:42:51.29]

Participant: Thank you very much.

No worries.

Participant: Rolling back to something you said before in regards to when you feel your aloneness, I've been in that place, I've had a fairly lonely childhood. I've got to the point where I have really felt that pain and then...

Are you still alone?

Participant: No, but...

Are you in a relationship?

Participant: Not on the planet, no. Not on the Earth.

That's okay. But you are in a relationship? Like you know the person who you love and you feel an exchange of energy with them do you, in the spirit world? Is that why you say not on Earth? [00:43:41.16]

Participant: Okay just let me go to the next point.

No worries!

Participant: No this will probably answer it. What I hear is that you're not alone, God is there, and God loves you.

But can you understand you've got to experiment with that because you're not going to feel that initially? [00:44:03.10]

Participant: Yeah, I need to experiment with that and this is the conclusion I'm coming to now. What happens is that, when I ask something like, "Give me a sign to show that you exist..." because I'm still developing a relationship with God. I've called it Creator, I've called it source in the past, whatever, and I've got a bit of angst about the word God so I'm still developing that. So, I hear these words, "But God loves you," and I'm wondering where that comes from? [00:44:45.18]

You hear them in your head you mean?

Participant: I hear it in my head. At times in my life parallel to this, I've had communications with the Archangel Michael and I'll pray and I'll ask for answers and I get answers. The answers can be very scary but my problem is when I do receive a sign that's affirming all this kind of self doubt comes up and I think, "Well okay do I just want to believe that that's come from a place..." [00:45:26.06]

So you're finding that you're like a serial sign-looker for it? Is that how it is?

Participant: No, no I'm not a serial sign but when I do get a sign, I doubt and I think, "Well give me another sign," you know. [00:45:45.17]

"Give me another and give me another."

Participant: So my question is what am I doing? Okay. There are a number of things that you are doing, but can I rewind you back to the bit that you wanted to avoid first?

Participant: Alright. I'm willing.

You wanted to avoid the question about relationship.

10. Fears of developing relationships

Participant: Ah ha I'm wondering what you want to say next. [00:46:13.09]

Well no there's now some fear coming up about what I'm going to say next, is there not? [00:46:18.26]

Participant: I'm not feeling anything. I don't know what I'm ... I'm not feeling anything.

But the fact that you avoided the question the first time I asked is an indication that there was fear present. [00:46:28.05]

Participant: I don't feel I was avoiding it so much I felt that something else I needed to say to give you a bigger picture of what I was talking, you know... [00:46:36.20]

Well what I'm going to say...

Participant: Maybe you're seeing something I don't. I don't know. [00:46:39.20]

Well what I'm going to say about this will help you with the second question. You want to have a relationship with God?

Participant: Yes I do.

But you don't want to have to have a relationship with your soulmate.

Participant: I don't know who my soulmate is.

Ah! That's not the point.

Participant: Okay, right.

Even if you did know or didn't know, do you want one? [00:47:04.16]

Participant: Yeah but I think it probably scares the hell out of me.

Exactly! That's what I'm saying. The whole idea of relationship, which is actually what I said a few seconds ago, scares you terribly. [00:47:15.04]

Participant: Actually it does, yes.

Why?

Participant: I am very scared about who I am and being seen for all my facades and everything! [00:47:32.20]

So you could say, I don't like using the term vulnerable because it's not really a... but you're scared of being transparent?

Participant: Very much, yeah I'm petrified actually.

But there's a bigger fear. What are you scared of if you enter a relationship, what is going to happen? (AJ writes rejected on the whiteboard) [00:48:00.13]

Participant: Oh shit. Probably yes.

So you feel you might be rejected, okay. So keep going.

Participant: I don't know put down, abused, I don't know all those things. [00:48:21.09]

Controlled?

Participant: Controlled, definitely.

In fact I would have listed controlled as your number one issue with a relationship. [00:48:28.17]

Participant: You're probably right, yes.

So you are afraid that if you enter a relationship with a person, an individual, of the opposite sex in your case I gather it is, the feeling is that you're afraid that they're just going to control you. [00:48:51.08]

Participant: Yes.

And there's a potential of later rejection anyway and then there's also this terrible fear that if they see you for what you really are, they probably won't like you anyway and they'll probably reject you anyway. Is that not true? [00:49:04.23]

Participant: All the above!

So they are the primary fears, can you see? So that's the fear of relationship. Now what are you trying to develop with God again? [00:49:17.18]

Participant: A relationship.

Ah! It's a relationship with God we're trying for.

10.1. Developing a relationship with God

So can you see? I'm serious about this! Can you see with a relationship with God you also are going to have the same fears? [00:49:38.18]

Participant: I never thought of it that way.

Can you see that? And as a result of that, whenever you do get reassured that God loves you and God cares for you, the fear of, "Ah, but God will see me. How can God love me while God sees me? God can't love me, I feel terrible about myself and God must see that and so how can God love me?" [00:50:04.04]

And so you naturally are going to go into your doubts about any signs that God exists. As an automatic response! There's also this fear that if God sees you, then God's going to reject you. God's going to say, "You're not very good actually. I see all of you and it's not very nice in there. So I don't want to love you." That's what you feel God is going to do with you. But you also feel that God has a long list of laws and requirements, just like mum and dad had, of how this love will be expressed and how you will be controlled in these relationships. [00:50:46.15]

10.1.1. Doubt is an addiction that helps us avoid our fears

So this is why I asked you the question about relationship, can you see? The question you avoided is because it's actually helping you go into doubt. You want doubt. You desperately want to doubt. Do you understand that? The reason why you desperately want to doubt is because doubt helps you avoid the feeling of these feelings. [00:51:15.08]

Participant: I don't have to face them.

You don't have to face them. If you can just go, "Ah, but I doubt that." So God gives you a sign, "I doubt that." God gives you another sign, "I doubt that." God gives you another sign, "I doubt that." It's really convenient for you to keep doubting these things because you get to avoid all of these terrible emotions that are inside that are the reason why you've avoided a relationship, a physical relationship as well. And that's the relationship between the physical relationship and the relationship with God. [00:51:48.00]

You are going to push upon God exactly the same type of feelings you have towards a person who you can potentially enter a relationship with. This is why you are not that happy about the idea of a soulmate necessarily. So while intellectually you think, "Oh, that's interesting," emotionally the feeling is, "No, no I don't want a soulmate! I don't want a soulmate because there's another half. What are you saying there's another half that I've got to be with? Like urgh, you know." That's the feeling inside and that feeling is of course the same feeling that's present with God, the same feeling that was present or created by your family structure as you were growing up, that still exists within. [00:52:33.21]

Participant: Oh definitely, all those errors.

Yeah and I could list some more related to that of course but you're able to list them anyway, aren't you? But can you see that your doubt is an addiction? Because your doubt helps you get away with feeling your fears. [00:52:58.13]

Participant: The doubt keeps things at a distance.

The doubt keeps this at a distance, this at a distance, this at a distance, (AJ points to fears of relationships on the whiteboard). If I can doubt God exists, I cannot enter into a relationship on Earth, then I get this beautiful addiction, which is I don't have to enter a relationship, I don't have to confront the possibility of being rejected, I don't have to confront the possibility of being controlled, I don't have to confront being transparent, being seen by another person, I don't have to. And my doubt helps me stay away from all of that. It's very convenient, you see. [00:53:35.09]

And the trouble with our addictions is that, our addictions are often very, very innocent looking little addictions that cover large fears. So it's sort of like your doubt is just sitting there, nice and innocent, "Ah, I just have doubt occasionally. Oh I just have another doubt occasionally," and so forth, and it's very convenient because it helps you avoid all of these things that you're terrified of dealing with and would prefer not to have to deal with. And that's also why I asked you about your relationship. [00:54:16.22]

Participant: Thank you for pursuing that.

Not a problem, it's my pleasure. The thanks is not sure about the thanks, is that how it is? The trouble with truth is its like, "Okay, okay I get that, but did I want that? I'm not sure." [00:54:40.18]

This is the issue with our fears. You see a lot of times the layer of addiction above our fears is so seemingly innocent, seemingly small that we don't realise sometimes how strongly connected we are to it; just little tiny belief systems, which we create in our addictions to avoid whole groups of emotions. [00:55:01.23]

And the reality is that you're not going to be able to enter a relationship with God or anyone else for that matter without confronting these emotions, you're going to have to confront them at some point. Now whether you choose to confront them now, or leave it a hundred years and confront them in a hundred years' time, that's really up to the individual, what the individual chooses. My suggestion is to confront every single emotion as soon as you're aware of them existing. Start praying about them, talking about them with other people. Work through the emotion straight away as soon as you're aware because when you start doing that, you get out of the addiction and start processing your way through the fear and it stops controlling your life. So it's very powerful. [00:55:59.19]

Participant: I just wanted to ask about, you know how you had the table on the board before? I get the intellectual part is basically where we've all gone as adults and the emotional bit is probably where children start without any of the intellectual bit. [00:56:16.27]

They do.

Participant: But it's the getting them together that I find I struggle with, because I realise a lot of truth and then sometimes I'll get into this area where the truth and the loving truth marry up but it's not often. Most of the time I'm not really willing to be... I don't really understand how to use this experimental stage of being childlike with all truth. [00:56:49.25]

11. God's definition of normal versus our definition of normal

So perhaps we need to discuss more the experiment? Okay, so how do we go with experimenting with our life without making a mess of it? Too late, it's already done! Yeah, that's right; it's like, "Oh! There's a way to experiment without making a mess!" [00:57:19.11]

Now it depends what defines a mess too by the way. So do you want to define a mess as the way the world defines a mess or do you want to define a mess the way God defines a mess? I don't know about you but I prefer God so I'm going to start with God's. So what's God's definition of a mess, in terms of you? In terms of an individual, being in a mess! What would be the pure state from God's perspective and then we can see what would be a mess from God's perspective? What would be the pure state? [00:57:57.15]

So God's state would be the person is loving. So the mess from God's perspective... remember God doesn't have a quality of judgement of the mess. So God's not saying, "You terrible person, you're in a mess." God's aware of how you got into a mess and most of it wasn't even your problem initially, it was the decisions you made afterwards. But the mess is an unloving person. [00:58:25.00]

God's definition of a mess vs. our definition of a mess

So what's God's definition of something that's sane and real? So look at the truth. So the mess would be somebody who's untruthful, wouldn't it? With self and others. Okay. What else from God's definition? Humble. What's the mess one going to be? A person who's arrogant, what's a person who's arrogant likely to be? Okay, they know everything; they think they know better than everyone else, what else? [00:59:22.13]

Honest, can we say truth is a part of being honest? A person who's living in their passions! What would you be living in if you were in a mess? Addictions and fear. What else? Desire! What is a person who's in a mess? Living in fear rather than desire. What else? Trust, okay. What's a person here? (AJ moves to the mess side of the whiteboard) Distrusting, doubting, untrustworthy often they are too. [01:00:25.26]

Can you see what we're doing? We're constructing a list of what you could be like and constructing a list of what often we are like, amazingly. Okay, so let's look at that. Now my suggestion is do this exercise with everything that you can think of. As a personal exercise to list all the things if you're in your pure state, in passion, you're loving and everything, what would you be like? And you can often use your imagination and often get a bit of spirit help to imagine what you would be like in that state. [01:01:04.17]

Now can you see something growing in this list here on this side on the right hand side? This is a definition of a mess. Does anybody want to make a comment about that definition of a mess? [01:01:36.03]

Participant: So would they be pretty much our mess, would they be the errors that we have within us that we need to release. Like distrust would be one of them we'd need to work on our fears... [01:01:46.15]

Just let me summarise the whole thing. God already knows you're in a mess. Has that not dawned upon you? But you don't. Has that not already dawned upon you? [01:02:28.12]

You see if I didn't use that heading and I rubbed that out and I replaced it with another heading which is called "Normal", now that's how most people are. You think about it, in the course of an average day, how much do loving emotions drive most of us compared to unloving emotions? It would be hard to say that loving emotions dominate wouldn't it, in the course of a day? Like, often we're tired, exhausted, you know feeling quite negative about our work or whatever, particularly if we're in a job that we don't like, and so forth. [01:03:14.15]

In the course of a day, how often are you totally truthful with every single person around you? So a person comes up to you and they're a bit overbearing and you just go, "I find you to be a very overbearing person." You wished you could say that but we don't do we? The reality is we're quite untruthful with almost all of our interactions with people. [01:03:38.17]

Now how many times do we want to believe that we know everything about a subject? Or know a lot of things about a subject? Preferably all of the time isn't it? Pretty much! How many times do we want our addictions met during the day? Like most of us wake up in the morning and the very first thing we do is usually on our addiction list. [01:04:03.17]

How much fear do we have in the course of a day? Fear to be a person who does what they desire and all of those kinds of things? In the course of a day it's quite a lot if we analyse it. How often are we very mistrustful of every single person, "Oh I don't trust that person, I don't trust that person. And that character who says he's Jesus I definitely do not trust that person." [01:04:25.27]

So this is what happens, this is normal. This is what most of us classify as normal, but God sees that as a mess. This is all facade. It's all creating a person we're not created to be. We're in this place. This is the place God would love to see us in and to be honest isn't it the place where most of us would love to see ourselves in? Like even if God wasn't in your life, wouldn't you want to be a person who's loving, truthful, humble you know those kinds of people are very, very easy to be with. You can spend a whole day with them and not get angry. Except when they tell you the truth and then you might get angry. [01:05:10.29]

So that's the reality of life, what we view as normal, God sees as, "Wow, that's a bit crazy, actually, that kind of lifestyle is crazy. Why do you want that for?" Is the way God sees that. Now God has given you the will, the free will to make the choice to have that life if that's what you wish, but can you see that as soon as we start confronting this we're going to have to start changing our viewpoint of what is normal. You can see that can't you? [01:05:44.29]

We've got our viewpoint from something that we believe is a normal way of looking at life into something that is a very, very different way of looking at life which is what I feel is God's view of normal. That's normal from God's perspective (AJ points to the God list on the whiteboard). This is normal from man's perspective. [01:06:03.04]

Now obviously in the process of confronting that, we're going to end up with confronting a lot of the people around us as well because the guy who's all needy and comes up to me and is quite overbearing and you say to him, "I actually find you quite overbearing." He's going to be confronted by that truth is he not? He's going to feel something as a result. And a lot of times we are not prepared to bite off the results of that and so we don't engage things truthfully. [01:06:32.10]

That being the case though, you also know that if the person is truthful even when it's hard to be truthful, you can trust them a lot can't you? If you're with a person who slips out of this one with a little white lie there, slips out of that one with a little thing here and does things behind your back because they don't want to tell you to you face or whatever, do you finish up trusting them very much? Of course not! It's a consequence. It's a result of what we view as normal but it's not what God views as normal. [01:07:05.05]

11.1. Fear keeps us from becoming God's definition of normal

Let's redefine this to what we had before – from 'Normal" to a 'Mess'. Now that being the case, why would we ever want to remain how we have been? There can only be one reason can't there, really? There's no other reason other than fear as to why we would want to stay in that place. When we look at our definition of normal, we go, "I don't want that, I don't want that, I don't want that." If we look at that without any fear of how other people would think of us, any fear about our partner and whether they are going to leave us or not, any fear about our friends and whether they're going to think we're an idiot or not. If we looked at that we'd go, "That's not what I want to be." [01:07:51.01]

We'd look at God's definition of normal and go, "Yes that's the kind of thing I'd want to be. I want to be that kind of person." Of course I'd want to be this kind of person, wouldn't I? And we could add all of these things we put on the childlike qualities list, and we could list what the opposite is on our normal list.

And when we look at our life honestly, can we not see that a lot of times we've got this list going full on (AJ points to our definition of normal) and this list (AJ points to God's definition of normal) is barely on our radar. And what we're going to need to do at some point is to confront within ourselves our fear because without confronting our fear, we're not going to change. [01:08:32.04]

11.2. Changing our concept of normal

And we need to change. The whole world needs to change. And the only way the world is going to change is by individuals changing, so we need to change if we want change. If we want to be happy we need to change. And that's going to mean letting go of the mess. Unfortunately though, we have our sense of worth from this mess because we've been taught over many, many years, to be so invested in the person we've become. We now have a terrible investment in terms of our sense of worth. Every time we give up one of these things we think we're giving up ourselves somehow. From God's perspective, every time you give up one of those things, you're becoming yourself somehow. But from our perspective every time we give up one these things we're losing ourselves somehow and this is the challenge that we face. Our concept of what is normal needs to be adjusted. [01:09:36.23]

Last week in Adelaide I gave a little half an hour talk at the end of our presentation about normal. Normal from our perspective and normal from God's perspective are two very, very different things. And we need to change our concept of normal. You see it's our concept of normal which is actually a mess that is a problem because we don't know we're in a mess we view it as normal. Our concept of normal needs to change! [01:10:11.22]

So for many of us in our relationships, our concept of normal needs to change because for many of us in our relationships there are addictions where one person does everything for the other person in the relationship and the other person hardly does anything. That's an addiction. In a relationship that's balanced and loving, two people would equally love each other; they would have a desire to please each other, a desire to engage each other emotionally, physically, sexually and so forth. That's what would be normal if we had it in this column but what's normal for most people on the planet is to have emotional bargains, to have sexual bargains, to have physical bargains; one person does all of one job the other person never does it. The other person goes to work; the other person never goes to work. We see all of these addictions in play because they suit our sense of worth and until we're willing to confront them, nothing can change in our relationships.

And the same applies to outside of a relationship in our relationships with our colleagues, our workmates, our businesses, our life, our whole life and our relationship with God. This is something that we need to address, if we want to be happy.

Participant: I was in Adelaide last week and after hearing the discussion... in one week I've learnt an amazing amount about what you've just been talking about. I thought I had a soulmate and we'd had discussions about it and I sort of realised that I didn't actually, not with this particular person. And she was just coming and coming and coming and still saying to me you're my soulmate... I knew internally and didn't end it. I was not very humble, not in truth and not being loving to them because I knew and yet I couldn't sit down and have the discussion because I felt I was being loving because I didn't tell her because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. And it was killing me and it was probably the best thing to have that discussion that we just had there last week because it changed everything about what I'm doing now so I understand and I put a few things straight in the last week.

And that's the power of truth, isn't it?

Participant: The truth was amazing. The difference in her is just over the moon and I mean from throwing things at me too but a couple of days later she came back and said thanks for putting it on the right track and telling the truth because she said she felt she wouldn't have seen it. [01:12:56.06]

Now I didn't answer the other question completely so can you remember what the original question was that caused me to go into this...? [01:13:03.12]

12. Experimenting to get from an intellectual understanding to an emotional understanding of truth

Participant: Yeah it was how do we get from this intellectual state of knowing God's Truth to experiment with it that way to make it a feeling and an experience of the truth? [01:13:16.04]

Okay, so the key is how do we begin this experiment? To begin any experiment you've got to start at the point of what you know. It's like scientists know this. So what they do is they construct experiments that extend their knowledge beyond what they currently know. Is that not true? That's how scientists do their experiments, yes? [01:13:38.28]

So what we need to do is the same thing okay? So let's assume that this mess that God sees us in that we believe is fine, that we believe is all good, and let's assume that for a moment that it might be a mess but we've got to prove it don't we? We've got to prove that it's a mess. So what would we do? [01:14:04.14]

12.1. Speaking the truth experiment

Well what we'd do is we'd choose one subject, so let's choose truth, and we'd make an experiment. What would the experiment be do you think, pretty simple experiment? Speak the truth every single moment to every single person for one week. The feelings that you actually feel, speak the truth every single moment, to every single person for one week. You've seen dramas about this, have you not? Where a person has to do this and you see their life going into turmoil. You know what's that one with Jim Carey? "Liar, Liar". Try that for a week. [01:14:57.27]

Now already before we begin what do we notice? Fear!

Okay, fear. This is just one experiment; we've got others to do yet. All these others to do, this is just one experiment. One week, one experiment. Could you design an experiment like that? Quite simple isn't it? I'm going to speak... what do I feel? This is what I'm going to say. [01:15:29.00]

So what do I feel about Mary? She's my partner, right? What do I feel about her? And I'm going to tell Mary exactly what I feel, good and not so good. I'm not going to edit it like I've always done before. I notice before there are certain things that maybe I don't like but I don't tell her because I know she'll be upset. So when she comes up and says, "Does my bum look big in these jeans?" I'll go, "Yeah, darling it does," if that's what I felt. We've got a running joke about that in our relationship because I say, "Yes darling you've got a size 22 backside," which of course she hasn't got. [01:16:23.07]

But if we are truthful and see what happens, that's the experiment, see what happens. Now you'll find in that experiment a lot of very amazing things. People, who you thought liked you, don't like you at all. People who you thought you could get away with saying anything to, you can't. People, who you thought were loving in all circumstances and situations, are not loving in the situation of receiving truth. And I'm not saying to do it in an angry way because you want to engage in a loving way wouldn't you? [01:17:13.20]

Now if you're in a relationship you will actually find if you engage truth in a loving manner, there are only two possible outcomes. Your relationship will get closer, that's outcome number one or your relationship will break up very rapidly, that's number two. There're the only two possible outcomes. [01:17:39.20]

And if you engage truth at work, there are only two possible outcomes. You'll get exactly the job you want doing exactly what you want to do, or you'll get sacked. That's what you'll find. It's a great experiment but you've got to be willing to address the fear, yes? It requires courage doesn't it to do that? [01:18:06.21]

Now that's only one experiment so you could engage another experiment. Let's say the truth experiment is far too confronting for the first one, so you rub that one out, we don't do that one. It's just too much for you there to engage that one. Which one would you prefer to engage? [01:18:24.22]

Desires!

12.2. Desire experiment

Let's go for desires, desire seems to win. So let's go for desires, okay. What's the opposite of desire? Fear! Interesting you thought that one wouldn't be very confronting. It's one of the most confronting ones you can imagine. [01:18:39.06]

So that means this week I could construct an experiment where I only do what I desire and I don't do anything else. Half of you won't go to work this week, so you still end up getting the sack. But can you see again, how you can design certain experiments associated with that? And when I say experiments, experiment with your desires. "What are my desires? What do I really like doing?" So go and do something. [01:19:16.26]

How many of you guys have been dancing? How many of you have been ballroom dancing? How many of you liked it? Yeah, so a few! This is great isn't it? So if you've never been how do you know? Almost pretty much everybody who goes likes it. So if you've never gone, you don't really know whether you'd like it or not, is that not true? So why don't you for one week at least, enrol in a ten week... well usually they don't have one week courses unfortunately, so you have to enrol in a ten week course, and go ballroom dancing. If you've got a partner take her with you if she'd like to come and experiment with that. Engage it without fear and let yourself feel your fears come up. [01:20:20.11]

You know the fear that, "Ooh, I trip up over my feet all the time." That fear will come up and there are other fears that will come up, "What will I look like in front of all these people?" And then there's another fear, the guy comes along, the instructor comes along and taps you on the shoulder and says, "You're not very good actually; this is the way you need to do it." And you feel all terrible inside because you can't do it right the first time you're doing it. And there are all these fears coming up just by you engaging the process, just a simple process. One hour a week or something like that!

So what else could you do in terms of experimenting with desire? You see you could also experiment with fear couldn't you? So how would you do that? Yes, pray, it's a very passive thing well in the sense it's like, "Please God show me how to deal with my fears," and then you sit down at home and don't go anywhere. It's a very passive thing. [01:21:17.05]

12.3. Experiments to address our fears

Participant: AJ, I tried abseiling to cure my fears of heights...

So abseiling to cure your fear of heights, does that cure them? No of course it doesn't, because your fear of heights has nothing to do with heights actually. But you need to experiment with that and you see now that you've experimented by going abseiling you know that actually abseiling doesn't cure my fear of heights. So there's one thing I can scratch off the list for the next thing to do to cure my feeling of fear of heights. I can say I've tried that and it didn't work. Try it twice!

So we make a choice, we follow it through, end up with it and the result is, "No it didn't cure my feeling of my fear of heights," so scratch that off the list. So obviously my fear of heights isn't related to heights. So that tells me a great deal about my fear of heights. So that then means I need to construct some kind of other experiment that links somehow... So for example what does my mum feel about heights? That would be an interesting question to experiment with, if she's alive. [01:22:23.22]

Any other ways that we could address our fears?

Participant: Fear of the dark.

Fear of the dark, okay. So have you found that when you sit in the dark, turn off the lights and sit there shaking or whatever, the very next night it's exactly the same if you turn off the lights and shake or whatever. But you can experiment with that and at least say, "Okay my fear of the dark is not related to the dark," if you experiment with it. But if you don't experiment, you don't know if your fear of the dark is related to the dark or related to something else. It could be related to the fact that you can't see things in the dark. [01:23:07.16]

Participant: Going outside at night.

Going outside at night yeah, so it could be more related to the fear of what people in the dark might do to you. There are all sorts of things that it could be related to, not just the fear of the dark. It could also be related to how your mother viewed the dark when she was young. What happened to her in the dark when she was young? There are all sorts of relationships that we need to explore and experiment with, but if we don't do the experiment we'll never know. [01:23:40.24]

12.4. The purpose of experimenting is to become more loving, more happy and to determine truth

Participant: So we're talking about the experiments but what's the purpose, what are we trying to do here? [01:23:50.03]

What we're trying to do is become more loving, that's the underlying goal and happier is it not? So the beauty of any experiment that confronts us emotionally is that we will eventually release something emotionally and that will be gone from us completely. Then we'll be left with only emotions that are positive and that don't harm us and that are not defined by fear or addictions. In other words we'll get closer to God, closer to ourselves and closer to happiness, if we confront these addictions. [01:23:50.03]

And remember when I drew the original table up the top on both sides I said anything we don't know the truth about needs to be experimented with. So this is also a way for us to determine the truth, that's the whole point of the experiment. Its how do we determine the truth!

So in the experiment of abseiling to see whether your fear is of heights, you learned one primary thing and that is when you're up high and felt your feelings you're still afraid of heights. So you've gone through that process, but you're still afraid of heights. You go through the process again and you're still afraid of heights. So obviously this abseiling thing isn't the cure for the fear of heights. There's something else going on. And so you learn the truth. You learn more about the truth every time you create the experiment. [01:25:10.22]

This is also something that's really important to understand. This is about taking responsibility for your own life and your own happiness. You see if you expect other people to do the experiments for you and then you just sit back and relax, waiting for them to tell you the answers to these experiments; do you think that inside of yourself your own feelings will change? Of course they won't because for your feelings to change you're going to have to feel something, for your feelings to change, that's the reality. You've got to experience the feelings. [01:25:52.14]

12.5. An example of breast cancer and mammograms

Participant: I was talking about this with Di this morning about my fear of mammograms. So I'm unsure, they don't feel good to me I've never had one. So if I were in the unsure category of feeling that, to experiment to me would mean looking at information about them because there's a lot of fear about them that they can actually cause breast cancer. So I don't particularly want to put myself through that experiment just to feel the truth.

But let's be honest, Tara, what's the reason why you're afraid of a mammogram?

Participant: Well because I'm scared of what they might find.

No, that's not your main reason.

Participant: Well you see years ago before mum had her breast cancer, I would feel sick at the thought of a mammogram. I just felt sick at the thought but now I've got a fear, yeah. [01:26:53.12]

Now we're getting more closely to the point. Firstly mum died of breast cancer. [01:27:01.01]

Participant: And my grandmother.

Grandma died of breast cancer.

Participant: That's my fear but my biggest block is my denial because I tell myself it won't happen to me. [01:27:26.13]

Exactly! You don't want to even know the results of the mammogram and that's why you're not going to get one because you don't want to know the results of it. You don't want to know whether it's positive or negative. [01:27:39.29]

Participant: But what if the actual act of the mammogram is unloving?

Well did your mum have a mammogram?

Participant: No.

Okay. Interesting! Did grandma have a mammogram?

Participant: No.

They weren't even invented then.

Participant: No I don't think they were but even if they were, she didn't and mum was scared of them as well.

Okay, did that stop her from getting breast cancer?

Participant: No. She didn't actually seek any doctor for the first four years after she discovered the lump. [01:28:07.02]

Why do you reckon that is?

Participant: Because she had a fear of the doctors.

The same fears that you have, interestingly enough. Same fears you have. Can you see that the actual cancer itself must be caused by something different than the mammogram or not having one? So it's interesting that you're going, "I'm not going to get a mammogram because it might cause breast cancer," but the reality is that's not the primary fear. The primary fear is that you might have breast cancer or that you might do a mammogram and find you have breast cancer and that is your primary fear and you can see that was also the fear of your mother and obviously something related to your grandmother too. [01:28:52.16]

Participant: Yes.

Now it would be far better to find out what the actual cause was. So do you remember which breast it was that mum started her cancer with? [01:29:01.04]

Participant: Mum was on the right and my grandmother was on the left. And I've been having a bit of tenderness on my left side, which is causing concern.

On the left, so you've been having the same as grandma.

Participant: So last night I woke up with a pinching feeling in the tender part... and that's... [01:29:37.21]

Breathe, now you're getting into your fear, very good.

Participant: But I know that I've still got this major block, the denial, which is really stopping me from feeling my fear because I'm going back into the, "It's fine, it won't happen to me." [01:29:53.16]

Yeah, often what you find happening, if I can point this out with breast cancer just as a general thing, I think you'll find if you trace back the lineage you've got, mum died started on the right, grandma on the left. Grandma's mum on the right, her mum, left and you can trace it back right, left, right, left, often right the way down through the chain if it's known whether they had cancer or not. And there are emotionally good reasons for that. Right meaning issues to do with the male, left meaning issues to do with the female. [01:30:33.15]

Participant: So does that mean that I'm more likely to have taken on my grandmother's unhealed emotions than my mum's if it's showing the left side? [01:30:43.18]

Well yeah, but it's a lot more complicated than that even. Grandma could actually be with you a lot of your life because she's passed a lot earlier than your mum and so therefore her emotions affect you. If she's Earthbound and she stays with you her emotions affect you. So grandma's emotions can affect you. On top of that, right-left means issues with male or female; right being male, left being female. So your mum had issues with pandering to men and trying to get their approval and trying to earn their approval and then feeling angry when she didn't get it. [01:31:18.19]

Participant: Yes I agree.

Your grandma had the opposite emotion. She had pandering to women issues wanting to get approval from women and then getting angry when she didn't get it. What kind of issues do you have? [01:31:31.04]

Participant: Yeah, I can see that one.

You don't pander to the males very much?

Participant: No.

But the females, you pander to them trying to get their approval, same issue as grandma. So these are issues that you can trace back. Now let's experiment. If you really want to experiment, what would you do? Now if mum died of breast cancer and she didn't get a mammogram and grandma died of breast cancer and she did not get a mammogram then that tells me that a mammogram is not the cause of breast cancer in your family. Wouldn't that be logical?

Participant: Yes.

So something else is.

Participant: Yeah, well I know that it was an emotion that was the reason for their cancer but... [01:32:12.03]

No you say that...

Participant: ... I was just wondering if the mammogram was going to contribute to it and if it was an unloving thing to be doing to detect it. [01:32:20.17]

If you knew it was an emotion, really knew in your soul that it was an emotion, you wouldn't be confronted about getting a mammogram. Because you'd go, "It's just a machine, it can't hurt me."

Participant: It just makes me feel so sick.

Exactly! Because of the fear of knowing the result! You see that's the feeling, the fear of knowing the result. That's the feeling you need to allow yourself to go through. How are you going to go through that feeling? [01:32:48.17]

Participant: By making an appointment and doing it.

Exactly! Make an appointment, getting a mammogram and seeing the result. Simple experiment!

Participant: Hard one.

Yes for you because there's so much fear involved. [01:33:03.27]

Can you see what we're talking about here is finding out the truth about our fears and the truth about desire? So desire and fear are basically opposite kinds of emotions so every time you desire, your fear won't generally be present. Every time you're afraid, your desire won't be present, even though you've shut down your desire. You can make experiments to find out the truth about these matters quite simply. [01:33:32.23]

13. Closing Words

Okay. Well I think we've exhausted everybody for this afternoon. I'd like to thank you very much for your time today and your effort to come along. I'm sorry that I gave you very late notice about the event; only this week I think I only put it on the Internet on Wednesday or Thursday this week. Fortunately it's been on Mary's page for a little while but many of you may not have known about that. So I apologise for that and the next time we come down, we'll give you much more notice.

