

### Spirit Relationships

### Positively Responding To Spirit Influence

### By

### Jesus (AJ Miller) &

### Mary Magdalene (Mary Luck)

### Session 1

### 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 that took place on 6th October 2012 by Jesus (AJ Miller) and Mary Magdalene (Mary Luck) in Murgon, Australia, as part of the Spirit Relationships series of talks. In it they explain Apostle Paul's Ephesians Bible verse about how to resist negative spirit influence, by putting on the "armour of God", using truth, ethics, morality, integrity and peace.

### Reminder From Jesus & Mary

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

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

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

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

### Please visit <http://www.Smashwords.com/profile/view/DivineTruth> or www.divinetruth.com for further information.

### Additional sessions on the subject in this book can be found on www.Smashwords.com/profile/view/DivineTruth

### For more information go to:

Divine Truth (www.divinetruth.com)

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Table of Contents

### Positively Responding to Spirit Influence: Part 1

1. Introduction

2. The two common pitfalls for people listening to Divine Truth

2.1. The Divine Love Path is all about developing a relationship with God

2.1.1. Spirits cannot impact us when we focus on God

2.2. Forgetting the opposition to Divine Truth

2.2.1. Addictions

2.2.2. Discerning our own thoughts from those of spirits

3. Earth-bound spirits are spirits that have yet to enter the spirit world

3.1. Reasons that Earth-bound spirits are drawn to the Earth

3.2. Many Earth-bound spirits are not aware that there is a spirit world or that they have died

3.3. Many spirits control people on Earth as well as other spirits

4. Developing a sincere longing for God

4.1. Difficulties in giving up addictions in the spirit world

4.2. Sincerity is required to progress in love in the spirit world

4.3. Spirits connect to us through our fears

5. Apostle Paul's Bible verse on how to resist spirit influence

5.1. Ephesians Chapter 6 Verses 11-18

6. Putting on the full armour of God against spiritual forces of evil

6.1. Dark spirits have a massive negative influence on the Earth

6.1.1. Spirits can choose to ignore the influence they are under from other, darker spirits

6.1.2. Negative spirit influence on Earth occurs because the Earth is in a first sphere condition

6.1.3. Negative spirits rule by manipulating people's fear and terror

6.2. Standing our ground on the day of evil

6.3. Explaining the armour of God

7. Girding our loins with truth

7.1. God's Truth provides protection from spirit influence

7.1.1. An example of being protected by the truth that God loves us

7.2. How to deal with personal attack using God's Truth

7.2.1. The example of AJ getting attacked by the media

7.2.2. An example of a Sikh lady getting attacked on Facebook

7.2.3. An example of spirits projecting at a woman that she is sexually dirty

7.3. Having judgement or other emotions associated with certain words

7.4. Summary of the meaning of "girding our loins with truth"

7.4.1. Protecting ourselves in areas of sexuality

8. The breastplate of righteousness

8.1. Righteousness is having ethics, morality and integrity

8.2. Being righteous involves asking, "Would I like this to be done to myself?"

8.2.1. An example of being ethical in sexual interactions

8.2.2. An example of being enraged with someone

### Positively Responding to Spirit Influence: Part 2

9. Having feet fitted from the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace

9.1. Reasons that dark spirits want to negatively influence people

9.2. Making a stand for peace includes not responding to violence with fear

9.2.1. The difference between making a stand for peace and keeping the peace

9.2.2. An example of an interaction with the media

9.2.3. The parable of sowing the seed

9.2.4. Peace is one of the fruits of love

9.2.5. Acting in peace will expose fears

10. Audience questions

10.1. Correcting situations where we've acted out of harmony with truth

10.2. Self-punishment is an avoidance of feeling the pain created by the people who taught us to self-punish

10.2.1. Self-punishment helps us avoid the fear of being attacked by others

10.3. Taking action in harmony with truth and peace allows fear to be exposed and released

10.4. Correcting past mistakes (continued)

10.5. An example of a lady acting to stop processing spirits' emotions

10.6. Identifying the Law of Compensation vs. spirit attack

10.7. Identifying whether our desire is our own or a spirit's

10.7.1. An example of a man being a secret gardener at night

10.7.2. Taking personal responsibility for our lives

10.8. Determining whether a desire is ethical

10.9. Determining what is real

11. Closing Words

Positively Responding to Spirit Influence: Part 1

1. Introduction

We would like to firstly welcome you all along for the first time in four or five months, since we last saw you. Thanks for coming along today. Have you found your life quite difficult over the last four or five months or quite easy? Interesting? Challenging? I feel that one of the main reasons we get quite heavily challenged relates to the topic we would like to discuss today. It's part of the Spirit Relationship series of talks and the topic is "Positively Responding to Spirit Influence". To introduce the topic we would like to outline with you some of the things that we notice happening quite regularly, particularly lately in our interactions with different people. [00:56:49.29]

We were talking to some people overseas who I have known for five years. They emailed me very recently and said things to me like, "I have never trusted you the entire time that I have known you." I go, "Well that's very interesting." And then they generally outline a whole series of reasons why they cannot trust me, or sometimes it's just a blanket statement like the one I just gave. None of their reasons are actually logical, or things that have actually happened and I find this quite interesting because it tells me that they are under quite a lot of heavy influence.

I have actually had people scream at me that they don't trust me. They have literally screamed at me. They were obviously over-cloaked by spirits at the time, so that has been very, very interesting. Now I am not saying that you have to trust me. What I am saying is that it is pretty unusual to know somebody for five years, to come along to many of the sessions they give for free, without actually developing some kind of trust at least. To do that for five years and still not be able to trust, there is obviously something else going on. There is obviously something else happening. [00:59:08.23]

We've also found this lately when we are invited to go around to people's homes. Many times we are invited to go to out to dinner to somebody's house, or something like that, and what we find is that before we go to the place the people get attacked by spirits so much, by the time we arrive they are so frightened of seeing us that sometimes we feel like we should probably just turn around and go back home, because of the fear that is being projected. [00:59:40.15]

Recently we went and visited somebody's house where this happened, and this is something that is regularly occurring now with us. We are invited to go somewhere, somebody feels that they would like to have us around or whatever, we go there, and before we arrive the person becomes so spirit-influenced that by the time we arrive they are literally shaking with fear of us. As if you have anything to fear from us! And a lot of times this is a very, very, very, heavy spirit projection of rage at any single person who has anything to do with us. That is really what is happening but most people don't recognise it as such, and they just feel really bad that they invited us. So this is something that is also happening very regularly. [01:00:59:00]

What we are also finding is that in many of the presentations that we do now there are large groups of people who originally say they want to come and then, when we actually do a presentation in a location, most of them do not come. They have invited us to go to a location, we go to the location, and we start doing something with the people in the location. But a lot of people have not bothered coming and we can feel how much of their not interacting is spirit influence.

When we were in Brazil there was a lot of spirit influence, influencing people to not even arrive or have that first interaction. It was so interesting how much that occurred. In the end we almost just went, "Okay there are probably only going to be three people here this time," even though there were seventy or a hundred people who had indicated that they wanted to come. And as it turned out, we finished up changing venues at the last minute because we just knew that the venues would just be far too large for what would be the audience. Again it's a lot to do with spirit influence; people being influenced.

Many of you have also been noticing that when you get under pressure you almost revert to old behaviours; have you noticed that? So while we were away, we heard from some of you: "Oh yeah I got drunk a few times while you were away," and "This kind of thing happened while you were away," and "That kind of thing happened while you were away." This happens because there are certain spirit influences upon you that occur and it causes you to go into a state that you sort of forget who you are, or the difference between yourself and what influence you are receiving. A lot of people are not aware of how much they are being influenced by spirits.

Now I am not saying all of this to frighten any of you because I don't believe there is anything to be frightened about. Firstly, we must recognise that spirits are just normal people. Many of us forget that in our interactions with them. They are just normal people who have lived on Earth who have now passed. That is all they are. So they have very similar feelings to what you have about all sorts of stimuli, and they respond in a very similar way to how you respond. They are just normal people. The average person you meet down the street is no different to the average spirit you are going to meet. [01:03:30.02]

Mary: Who agrees with that?

Many do, many of you understand this. It is very important that you keep this in mind because these people who are now without a physical body can only influence you in the same way that any person on Earth can influence you. There is only one difference. They can influence you without you feeling or seeing their presence. That is the only difference. They can only influence you, most of the time, because you do not see them with you. And while you do not see them or feel them or even hear them, they are dropping thoughts into your mind. They are causing you to have certain interactions in your day-to-day life without you being aware of how much influence is actually happening. So we need to start understanding better how to combat these kinds of influences. How many years have you been waiting for such a discussion? (Laughs)

So the way this is going to proceed is that Mary has some subjects and topics that she would like me to cover during this discussion and she will probably be involved in the discovery of them as well. We are happy for your questions to be part of this presentation so please feel free to ask questions as you go. But please make sure that the questions are not taking us off on a different subject; stay on the subject we are discussing if you can. [01:05:24.28]

2. The two common pitfalls for people listening to Divine Truth

Mary: Okay, so you have introduced this idea of spirit influence. It is something that lots of the audience are quite familiar with already but there were two common pitfalls that people fall into when they hear the teachings of Divine Truth that you said you would like to emphasise. The first one is that people often forget that the Divine Love Path is actually about developing a relationship with God. So who can relate to that, kind of losing sight of that theme and going, "Oh it's emotions, its spirits, oh it's this, oh I've got to, wow... hang on isn't this about God?" And it can end up going down a sidetrack. [01:06:18.04]

2.1. The Divine Love Path is all about developing a relationship with God

Many of us have forgotten that it is about your relationship with God. It's not about your emotions at all. You need to be emotionally connected in order to be connected with God, but it is not about focusing on your emotions at all. It is not even about focusing on your desires, although it is great if you have a desire and you follow that with passion, particularly if your primary desire is to have a relationship with God. There are issues to deal with to become more loving, but it is not about focusing on becoming more loving, or in other words, trying hard to be more loving.

The reality is that if your focus is on your relationship with God you will automatically become more loving through the relationship that gets established. On YouTube over the next few weeks we will be adding an interview that was done with Dane. It is a lovely interview by the way, Dane. I just really enjoyed and loved watching it. [01:07:24.02]

Mary: Very inspiring.

It was a very inspiring interview. In it, Dane was asked many things about his personal life and so forth and he was very, very open about his life. But one of the primary things that he realised and it comes through in the interview is his relationship with God. Focus on a relationship with God. When you focus on a relationship with God, all other things sort themselves out, you actually have more drive and desire in your life. You actually become more joyful, not negative, when you focus on this particular relationship. Many of us get influenced into focusing on everything else but our relationship with God and that is why many of us finish up feeling sad at times, we feel like we are being overwhelmed by emotion at times and so forth. The reality is that if you focus on that relationship everything will automatically come to you that you need in order for you to grow. It's very important for you to understand. [01:08:32.10]

2.1.1. Spirits cannot impact us when we focus on God

Mary: And when you compare a bunch of spirits with the awesome power and love of God, you know who is going to win that little battle, don't you? A lot of the time we are focusing on our relationships with spirits, or allowing our relationships with spirits to dominate our life, forgetting about God. If we were to realign our focus to this relationship with God, a lot of the perceived power that we give to these spirits would disappear. We would realise, "Wow, actually when I am really connecting with God and focusing on God these guys can't even have an impact on me." [01:09:07.14]

They only have an impact when you walk away, really, from God. Remember the very first emotional injury that ever occurred on this planet? It was walking away from the Creator. So the reality is that every time we walk away from the Creator we are just involved in that emotional injury again. And we need to focus on dealing with that emotional injury because without this relationship with God, very little else can really occur in a loving way.

You see, natural love fails under certain circumstances. Have you noticed that? People, who are normally loving when everything is going fine for them, sometimes turn into monsters when everything is not going fine. A person who has God's Love in them does not change even if things are not going fine, they are still loving. That is a sign. You can't manufacture that place. You are not going to be able to try to do that; it will only come by your receiving Divine Love. Divine Love will transform your ability to be able to live in situations that are harsh at times and still be loving; that is the beauty of it.

So we don't have to try to be more loving, we need to have a stronger connection with God and receive more of that love from God. As we do that it will transform our ability to love. Natural love by itself, the love that normally comes out of your heart towards another person, can easily be manipulated by any addiction that you have. That's the reality. If you have an addiction of one kind, say it is a sexual addiction or an emotional addiction of one kind, or physical addiction to some kind of alcohol, drugs, some kind of substance, or food even, whatever the addictions are, you can be manipulated by those if you are reflecting on your own love. But once you have this relationship with God there comes a quality in that relationship that builds inside of you called integrity. Once integrity builds inside of you, you are unable to be hateful or hurtful or angry towards another person while that integrity remains within you. That's the beauty. That's partly how it transforms you. It gives you this ability to live in an environment that is often harsh but still be loving yourself, without trying. And if we have to try, that is just an indication that we have yet to receive enough Divine Love to no longer need to try. That is all it is an indication of.

2.2. Forgetting the opposition to Divine Truth

And the second pitfall is?

Mary: The second thing is that people often forget what opposition they are up against. [01:12:28.18]

Yes. So our relationship with God is our primary motivation for being here, okay? That's my personal opinion anyway. Now hopefully in the audience your primary motivation for listening is for the same thing; the development of this relationship with God. Many times we have selfish motivations, don't we, such as, "I want to become a better person," or, "I want to have a happier life," or, "I'm attracting harsh things at the moment and I would like to attract something better." These are all what I would classify as selfish motivations.

2.2.1. Addictions

You see we have to give up the selfish motivations and just focus on relationship with God, which is not a selfish motivation. We can talk about why in another talk maybe. But our list of selfish motivations are all driven by a group of emotions that we must call addictions.

We have these motivations because there are certain things that we want that we haven't been getting in our life, or that we need more of in our life, and we focus on having that drive us, and they are addictions.

Interestingly enough, the very people who do not want us to have a relationship with God are also very interested in you maintaining your addiction. This applies not just to people that are in the spirit world but usually every single person who is currently in our life has some kind of addiction with us. Now you will know the ones who don't because when you don't give them what they seem to want they are still happy with you. How many times are people still happy with you when you no longer give them what they want? Can you see how rare that is actually?

The majority of people are actually having an addictive relationship with us without even knowing. Now this also applies to the people who we cannot see. These are people who have passed from this life into what we call the spirit life but who are still are primarily Earth-bound; they still live around the Earth here. Now they desire to prevent you from having a relationship with God because they can see that if you develop a relationship with God they will get fewer of their addictions met. So they do not want you to sincerely develop a relationship with God.

Now this was mentioned in the Padgett Messages. The very Prayer that was given to James Padgett mentions this problem, so perhaps we can quote that part of the prayer. [01:15:51.05]

Mary: Towards the end of The Prayer there is the passage, "Keep us in the shadow of Your love every hour and moment of our lives and help us to overcome all the temptations of the flesh and the influence of the powers of the evil ones who so constantly surround us and endeavour to turn our thoughts away from You to the pleasures and allurements of this world." [01:16:15.29]

Can you see the relationship with all of these things that I am calling addictions? Let's call them "the pleasures and allurements of this world." And they sometimes tempt us, do they not?

Now these are spirits and people around us who are on Earth, who would like us to be involved with these particular things. Sometimes they can see within us very easily that we would like to be involved in those particular things. And it is much more easily seen by a spirit than perhaps it is by another person. [01:17:06.26]

2.2.2. Discerning our own thoughts from those of spirits

Participant: AJ, as you are talking, I am feeling about how with people we can see, such our friends and our family, we can feel when a person influences us, we can tell by their body language, we can see from the way their facial expressions are, how their tone of voice changes. In times in my life I have found that I have been easily influenced by my friends because I agree with a lot of the things that they are saying to me.

Exactly! Many people also have this attitude "If I disagree with my friends then I am going to lose my friends, and I am very invested in maintaining my friendships. So that means that I have to agree with them," and so you have this fear of being different that is present.

Participant: So then what I still struggle with, is discernment, because I still try to view them as spirit friends, even though they are not always friendly.

They don't always feel friendly, yes.

Participant: But sometimes their thoughts are so aligned with the things that I agree with that are in error I can't tell what's them and what's me.

Exactly, and we will discuss how to look at that during this discussion because this is a primary problem that many of us have; that our thoughts are so in line. The reason they are so in line is that these people are people who come from the Earth. They are people who have lived a life the same as we have, they often have exactly the desires we currently have, they often have exactly the same kind of experiences, they missed out on exactly the same things and they liked exactly the same things. So of course it is so easy for them to just drop a little thought here, drop a little thought there because we are so in alignment with them. [01:18:53.00]

Participant: It's like they are the ultimate debate team of justification and reasoning.

Yeah. I sort of feel though that if they were debating it would indicate that there was some misalignment within ourselves. Most of the time we are actually perfectly in harmony with them and we don't need much convincing at all. We will talk about that.

The other thing that we want to talk about is this constant feeling that we sometimes have of, "How do I tell the difference between my thoughts, their thoughts, my feelings, their feelings?" and so forth. Many of you worry about that. It's actually quite easy to tell the difference many times, but we often do not accept that we have a sympathy for their feelings, we have a sympathy for their thoughts, that we would actually prefer to have their thought than the one that's being suggested that love is. Many times that's the case and we need to have a look at that. And part of what we will discuss will address some of that. [01:20:03.01]

3. Earth-bound spirits are spirits that have yet to enter the spirit world

Participant: Could you just clarify Earth-bound spirits for me?

Sure. Let's just mention that because it is important to understand what happens with many of the spirits. On Earth there are I think 7.2 billion people, something like that. These are people who have physical bodies. When people pass or die, many do not know where to go, what to do, what life they want, or if they do many of them feel quite addicted to what they had on the Earth.

Imagine if you are a smoker on the Earth, you pass, and there is no cigarette smoking in the spirit world. What would you want to do? You'd come back to the Earth and try to connect to somebody who smokes. It is the same with a drinker; it is the same with many other emotional addictions that we have.

Many of the people who pass into the spirit world from this Earth, though they no longer have a physical body they do not want to remain in the spirit world in the location that they have prepared for themselves through their actions. So they come back to Earth and maintain connections with people on Earth, and those spirits become bound to the Earth. So for the majority of the time they are not in the spirit world in the sense that they are not in the location that would normally be their home, but rather they have made their home on the Earth somewhere. Many times it is in your own house actually, or other places that they have lived in their life, or their favourite places. There are around 22 billion spirits who are bound to the Earth in this way; on average three persons for every one of us. [01:22:13.18]

There are approximately 7.2 billion people on Earth and 22 billion Earth-bound spirits

We gave a seminar in England and there were at least a hundred spirit people for every person who was present. It was a very oppressive environment. That was the first talk we gave in England this year and it was very noticeable. One of the persons knew that they had a thousand persons with them while they were present at the talk, and many of them communicate with these spirits regularly. [01:22:13.18]

3.1. Reasons that Earth-bound spirits are drawn to the Earth

These spirits are bound to the Earth in that, through their addictions which they still want to have met, they feel that the Earth is the only place where their addictions can be met. In addition, they often do not have a clear understanding about the spirit world. They do not understand that there is a home for them in the spirit world. It might not necessarily be a home that they like, and they may not want to understand that. But there are also many belief systems that we abide by here on Earth that cause us to not be open to the fact that we have even passed. And so many of these spirits don't even have any idea that they are not physical. I have spoken too many of them who say, "Why doesn't the person listen to me? They should be listening to me." And you find out that the person they are referring to is still alive on Earth. The spirit has died and so of course they don't even understand why someone they used to interact with on Earth no longer talks to them. There are very many spirits who are in that position; as I said three spirits on average for every single person alive.

Participant: Do they have a choice to go back to the spirit world?

Yes.

Participant: If they desire to go to the spirit world, can they leave if they want to?

They can only go back and forward to the place where their soul allows them to. For many of them that is worse than the Earth in terms of the location and so they don't want to go there of course.

Mary: It is very much based on their soul desire, Christy. It's not an intellectual thought of, "Oh I should go somewhere else." It's like when we have an addiction to something that is so strong that our intellect might protest but the emotion is dragging us to that interaction. That is what it is like for spirits; when people lose their physical body their life is much more strongly dominated by their emotions. [01:24:55.29]

In chapter nine of Mary's book group on "Through the Mists" by Robert James Lees that you have just recently done there was a description of that. It is well worth watching Mary's discussion about it.

Participant: For the Earth-bound spirits, when they have a very strong feeling of guilt that they have left and that they are not looking after the people they have left behind, or if the person who is left behind is feeling a lot of emotions towards the other spirit, is that holding them back as well? [01:25:36.02]

Yes. Most of the time it is our emotions, the emotions of the people who are still alive on Earth, that draw these 22 billion people back to the Earth. If we did not have the emotions we have, these people's addictions would not be met and therefore they would never feel drawn to coming back here. And if they did want to come back through their own desire, they would not be drawn by somebody else but through their own desire, and there would be nobody that they could influence. That's the reality. We have the prospect in the future of having no spirits influencing the planet if we understand the truth about the matter. [01:26:19.05]

Participant: The other question goes back to pleasures and allurements. I was reading The Prayer the other day and the word "pleasures" just kept jumping out at me. I understand that the "pleasures" are the negative pleasures, the ones that are not loving.

Well, they are the pleasures that are driven by the addictions.

Participant: But they are not necessarily the ones that are really good ones and happy ones?

Well God has created our bodies to experience all sorts of pleasure. We are not talking about that in a manner that is being expressed lovingly but rather we are talking about it when we express those desires for those pleasures unlovingly. These are the ones that we refer to in the Padgett Message Prayer. [01:27:05.08]

Participant: And it's just a matter of understanding the difference? So perhaps you are being influenced by a spirit at the time and you are thinking, "Yeah this is a really loving one," but then you realise, "Oops, no it's not."

I've seen many people, for example, who are terrified of a riot, purposefully go to take photos. Now can you see that if you are taking photos of a riot at some point you might finish up getting involved with the riot, on the receiving end of the riot? But I've seen people who are terrified of a riot be so attracted to it because of the denial of their terror, they finish up taking photos of one. That is very interesting, isn't it; some of the things emotions can drive us to do. Placing ourselves in dangerous positions driven by some kind of a temptation or allurement, or even if it is just knowing what's going on that causes us to be in a location that is sometimes dangerous to our own health. [01:28:20.15]

3.2. Many Earth-bound spirits are not aware that there is a spirit world or that they have died

Participant: AJ, I'm just curious of the 22 billion Earth-bound spirits. I've heard you speak with spirits that are not aware of the spirit world. I am just wondering if you perhaps have an idea of the percentage of how many of those Earth-bound spirits are not even aware that there is a spirit world?

Around one third of the spirits that are Earth-bound have no idea that there is a spirit world and around one third of them also have no idea that they have died.

Participant: The same third?

Yes, often, and many of them have no idea. When I say no idea, they were taught there was a spirit world on Earth but it never entered their heart, it never entered their consciousness as a feeling, and so they just don't believe it. So when they pass they stay on Earth and many of them still think that they have a physical body as well. [01:29:19.12]

Participant: I don't understand - if they die and all their friends die, don't they get it?

Well, the problem is that many of them don't get it until all their friends die. Look at a person who dies in their 20's -30's, or 40's - 50's, how long do they have to wait before all their friends die? Usually it's thirty, forty, sometimes fifty years of waiting till all their friends die, and often people are Earth-bound for fifty years as a result of that. But then they get so caught up in some addictions with people on the Earth. It might be an addiction to drinking alcohol or some kind of emotional addiction and they then transfer the addiction to them. Then the person they had the addiction with dies and so they look for another person they can have the addiction with, without even thinking of moving on themselves or what happened to the person who just died. Things are not as obvious as what many of you believe, which you will actually find out when you arrive in the spirit world. (Laughs) [01:30:33.09]

3.3. Many spirits control people on Earth as well as other spirits

Participant: Thanks, AJ. Going back to Mary's book group on "Through the Mists"; when I was reading it, I was wondering about Marie, a spirit character in the book, who was drawn here, there and everywhere. And I wondered about the group of woman spirits who try and control and so forth. Is it because their main feeling is control that that's what they are driven to do? [01:30:59.10]

Many of the group of woman spirits that you are referring to are women who, when on Earth, unfortunately had very little power. As many of you ladies know, in the past women have been treated quite terribly. The men had the power and the woman had very little power, and when these women pass into the spirit world, because of their addiction to having power, instead of feeling the emotion of grief about not having power, they desire to influence women on Earth to give them more power. They are trying to connect to other people on Earth because of their own unwillingness to feel the lack of power in their life when they were on Earth, and they connect to women on Earth who they believe will have more power if they help them. As a result they influence many women. In fact when we were in Brazil most of the women that we met were heavily influenced by women who felt powerless in the spirit world, and who are now Earth-bound, trying to create a matriarchal society in Brazil. And they are well on the road to succeeding, by the way. It is literally a matriarchal society. [01:32:20.12]

Participant: Can spirits in the spirit world connect to another spirit in the spirit world through addictions and can there be a chain reaction? Like, can a higher spirit who has been there long enough connect to an Earth-bound spirit with an addiction so that they can connect to the Earth?

I understand the question; it's actually opposite to how you think. The darker spirits often control lighter spirits who are in fear. Very dark spirits who are enraged often control brighter spirits who are in fear, still in the hells of the first sphere. And these spirits who are in fear, their entire life is dictated by these darker rageful spirits. They feel the threat of death and the threat of violence from these darker spirits and so the darker spirits often manipulate the lighter spirits into manipulating people on Earth. [01:33:33.16]

We've got to be careful we don't get too snowed under with all these questions because there is a lot more we need to say.

4. Developing a sincere longing for God

Participant: When one of us here in this room passes into the spirit world, should the first thing that we do when we arrive be to continue with our focus on our relationship with God and to ask for help?

Of course, but it has to be sincere, Peter, and many in this room are yet to even have a sincere desire for God. See; remember a prayer is actually a sincere heartfelt emotion towards God. Unless I have a sincere heartfelt desire to have a relationship with God, then I won't have one. Also, unless I have a sincere heartfelt desire to get help, I won't get any help. It has to be driven by sincerity. Everything in the spirit world is driven by sincerity. Even the darkest of deeds is driven by sincerity. It's what they really want to do. [01:34:46.09]

Participant: So besides the desire for truth what's the spark that needs to ignite to cause that sincerity to occur?

I don't know, Pete; if I knew the answer to that question I would be convincing a lot more people about Divine Truth.

Participant: I've never heard you say that you didn't know an answer to a question before!

I've also said I don't know who made God! (Laughs) I've got no idea of the answer to those two questions.

My feelings are that unfortunately, with the way that things happen to us now, we sort of get beaten into submission before we develop sincerity, but that does not need to be the case. I often wonder with Mary in our private discussions why people have to get to that point before they start becoming sincere, and to be frank I don't really know why people have to have so much hardship in their life before they become sincere, because I do not believe that that is necessary to bring about our sincerity. [01:35:56.16]

4.1. Difficulties in giving up addictions in the spirit world

Participant: Is it easier to develop a relationship with God after you have passed?

No. It is very difficult. You could have some compassion for our spirit friends. Many of you are yet to have any compassion for them because you've not been in their position. When you arrive in the spirit world you'll be in their position, and then you will start to have some compassion for them perhaps. But we want to have compassion for them before then. Let's look at what their situation is. [01:36:33.01]

Many times on the Earth they have had a difficult life, just like you have. They have had difficult situations and circumstances, just like you have. They've had a difficult upbringing, just like many of us have, they have made many choices in their life that have been out of harmony with love, and their soul has become darker as a result of those choices. These are all feelings that they now have within them; they are feelings that are real that are sitting there inside of their souls and drive their actions.

Now here on Earth, the only reason many of you don't take a particular action is that there is a law against it, or that you are afraid of public opinion about taking that particular action. In the spirit world you will be attracted to a location where everybody has the same opinion as you, so if your opinion is, "I'm allowed to be angry with men, because all men are bastards," you're going to be attracted to a group of women who all believe they are allowed to be angry with men because "all men are bastards". They are going to have exactly the same feeling as you. Now can you imagine trying to get out of that feeling while you have a thousand other women surrounding you all with the same feeling? Can you imagine how difficult that would be? Very difficult.

So I have now attracted a group of people who have exactly the same opinions, belief systems and often the same history and life that I have had. How difficult is it going to be for me to get out of that position in comparison to getting out of my position on Earth? In addition, I now have unfettered restrictions. In other words I can come and go on the Earth as I please. See, when we are here on Earth we have limitations, do we not? We have limitations of cost, we have limitations of time, we have limitations of having to earn a living, we have to eat, we have to sleep, and there are certain things we have to do. Imagine for a moment that you have none of those limitations. None. You didn't have to work, so all of that forty hours a week that you spend working while you are on Earth you no longer have to spend working, imagine that. How much free time does that give you to do exactly what you want? Now if exactly what you want is to get some addictions met, it gives you forty hours more free time to get those addictions met.

On top of that, you now don't have to pay money; you don't need fuel or a car to get from A to B. You can just think your way from A to B. So I'm over here and I'm spending my time with Peter and all of a sudden I think, "That's right, Peter's got a cousin down in Melbourne. He's probably got the same addiction as Peter," and bang I'm there. Sure enough, there are two people now that I can get my stuff met through. Now can you see with all those allurements and no restrictions the majority of people will just go and do exactly what they want and the majority of people who pass do exactly that. There is no law in the spirit world preventing you from doing exactly what you want even if what you want is very harsh and harmful.

4.2. Sincerity is required to progress in love in the spirit world

Participant: So let's just say that we all pass right now, what would be your best advice for us?

You've asked these kinds of questions before, Peter. My advice would be to understand that you have your best opportunity of developing sincerity while you're here. You have the best opportunity of understanding truth while you are here. You have the best opportunity of understanding and developing a relationship with God while you are here. It is far more difficult than you can imagine currently to develop these things when you arrive in the spirit world if you have no foundation in them at all. So my suggestion is to develop these things here before you pass, not after. That's the whole reason why myself and Mary came here; because there is so much trouble for people who try to develop these things after they've left here. If you are in the unfortunate circumstance where you have not developed these things here and you pass into the spirit world, you are going to be faced with a much more difficult time to develop those particular things.

Participant: How is it then that the people who write messages in the Padgett Messages start off in a fairly dark place but in a relatively short space of time, with the help of the group who are there, make amazing progress and seem to go to a much better place quite fast?

I think you already know the answer to that, Pete, don't you? They are connecting with their friends, people who they can trust, who have demonstrated to them through their own personal appearance the condition they are really in. And because of that influence they progress positively. [01:42:38.14]

Mary: You know I think it's more than that, Pete. I think it's exactly what you were just talking about before. At the time where they have really asked a question, they've developed a quality of sincerity. And it's the same for us here, when we are really sincere about growing our relationship with God changes happen very rapidly. Some people stay in the spirit world for years and decades, and, some of them for centuries, before they develop sincerity. And when they develop it, they come to people to ask a sincere question and they get a sincere answer and they are off.

Pete, I also think you are selectively reading the Padgett Messages.

Mary: Yes. (Laughs)

Because there are many experiences in the Padgett Messages where higher spirits have gone to a person that is in a lower condition and the spirits said that they don't want to hear, they don't want to listen, they don't want to understand. Remember there was one experience of a man who said, "It's very hard to learn of heavenly things while you are in hell." We need to understand the messages as a whole system, not just a few of the messages.

4.3. Spirits connect to us through our fears

Participant: Going back to the comment that you made about the spirits in the spirit world who are rageful and then they attach to other brighter spirits in the spirit world who are fearful. That's very similar for us here to them isn't it? It's through our fear that they attach.

Exactly!

Participant: So if we allow ourselves to feel the fear of whatever the interaction with the spirit is, that will ease us through to the truth of it?

Certainly, but for many of us we are not feeling the fear, we are acting in the fear, which is a very different thing.

Participant: Can you clarify that a little bit, and give us a bit of an idea of what the difference might look like?

We will as we proceed in this discussion. Many of you are asking questions which will be answered in the natural course.

5. Apostle Paul's Bible verse on how to resist spirit influence

So getting back to the point that we raised earlier, the Padgett Message Prayer demonstrates that all of us have addictions that will cause us to be tempted to have interactions that are out of harmony with love. And the Prayer itself, as Mary read out, demonstrates that we need to start having a desire to no longer to respond to these temptations. And we need to discuss how we do that. [01:45:22.03]

Mary: Okay. So in order to direct our discussion today, we've chosen a Bible verse, which is a little unusual, and has really strong language in it, but we both feel that there are some very beautiful truths and lessons within the passage. I am going to read it to you.

Can I give a bit of background first about the Bible verse? This Bible verse was written by the man who is now called the Apostle Paul. I had my first interaction with Paul from the spirit world; he never met me on Earth. I appeared to him as a spirit and tried to influence him against his attacks on other Christians who were on Earth at the time. And Paul responded to that influence to such an extent that he became quite passionate in being a follower of my teachings, as he believed. Of course it was the teachings that he could discover at the time, a few years after my death.

As a result of that he was often inspired. Paul and I often had a connection, with me in the spirit world, and him on Earth, where I could channel things to him because of his passions, and he was quite a good channel actually. One of the reasons he was attacking the Christians was that he was channelling a group of Jewish spirits before then who were enraged by the whole Christian movement in the first century. He responded to those spirits and he did what they wanted him to do until such time that he had this interaction with myself. So oftentimes we channelled correct information to him, but some of it has been manipulated since then through later Bible revisionists. But this is one verse that is very close to what was originally given to him. [01:47:28.00]

5.1. Ephesians Chapter 6 Verses 11-18

Mary: Okay. It's a verse from Ephesians Chapter 6. I have actually brought with me today a few different versions from a few different Bibles, because the language varies slightly, but I'll read it all through first and then we will go through line by line and discover the meaning in it. These verses are from the New International Version. Its Ephesians Chapter 6 verses 11-18.

Mary: It says, "Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the Devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground. And after you have done everything to stand, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil ones. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people."

Mary: Sounds fairly full-on, doesn't it?

The armour of God described by the Apostle Paul in the Bible

So this Bible verse describes almost exactly how you can combat and actually positively respond to any influence. Shall we go through how that is true?

6. Putting on the full armour of God against spiritual forces of evil

Mary: Okay. The first part of the verse says, "Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes". So firstly, can you clarify this reference to the devil?

Yeah. That was added by a later revisionist. When we channelled the information to Paul, we actually talked about any person who was wicked. In place of "the devil's schemes" we actually said, "the wicked one's schemes". [01:50:31.29]

By the way for those who have not heard this before, there is no devil. Mind you, there are some spirits in the spirit world who are a lot worse than you can imagine the devil to be. (Laughs)

Mary: The next part says, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

6.1. Dark spirits have a massive negative influence on the Earth

Examine the fact that we have mankind on the Earth, and there are groups of spirits who guide what happens on the Earth, and who have guided what happens on the Earth for many, many millennia, many thousands of years. These spirits in fact control most of the systems of the Earth. Almost every system that you can imagine on Earth currently has some kind of control coming from the spirit world, and often the more organised it is and the more violent it is the more control is coming from the spirit world. There are very large groups of spirits who are in the spirit world who actually control the events on Earth. They are the people who control, through suggestion, the people on Earth who are in power or responsibility and that causes these people who are on Earth to do particular things.

Spirits influence almost every form of system on Earth through the people on Earth

The reality, for the majority of us, is that when it comes to some kind of wickedness occurring on the Earth, we are not actually fighting against the person who is being wicked on Earth. The reality is that those people are under a very large amount of influence from the spirit world.

Let's say that a person is acting in an evil manner, meaning out of harmony with love, and violently attacking. Spirits will be influencing that person into doing that. And the person on Earth doesn't understand how much they are being influenced because these people are unseen, as the scripture said. The people who are in the spirit world, who are unseen, are the people who have a lot of influence on what is going on. And because they are unseen, often the person on Earth does not know that they are being influenced so much.

For example many of you have heard of, or read about, people who have gone on a murder spree, and when you see them they often have a blank look in their eye. And they just say, "I can't remember what actually happened. Something seemed to overtake me; voices told me to do this." They say all sorts of things, which none of us on Earth generally believe, but these are actually the influences of spirits occurring, spirits having this influence over people.

So if I am a person on Earth who is wanting to develop a relationship with God, then the persons who are wanting to stop my relationship with God are not so much the people on Earth, but rather the spirits who are with me who are attempting to stop my relationship. [01:53:52.28]

6.1.1. Spirits can choose to ignore the influence they are under from other, darker spirits

Participant: You were talking earlier about how spirits influence other spirits. Are there any dark spirits that are unseen by other spirits? Can dark spirits influence other spirits without them knowing it?

It's very unusual for them not to see. The darker spirits are the persons who are in rage and influencing the brighter spirits. The brighter spirits can choose to see them, but it is a choice. Do you choose to see the things you are afraid of? Most of us choose to ignore the things that we are afraid of, do we not? This is what happens too many of these spirits. These spirits who are little bit brighter are in fear and choose to ignore the sight of a spirit who is in rage, just the same way that you in your day-to-day life often choose to ignore anything that you are afraid of. So while they have the capacity to see the darker spirit, they often choose to not see it, just like many of you will probably do when you pass. (Laughs) [01:55:26.28]

Brighter spirits who are in fear can choose to not see darker, rageful spirits who are controlling them

Mary: So is that clear for everyone? That in the New World translation when they talk about, "Against the authorities, against the rulers of this darkness, against wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places," they are talking about the darkness that dominates the Earth plane?

6.1.2. Negative spirit influence on Earth occurs because the Earth is in a first sphere condition

It's not just that. Our Earth resides in a spiritual condition that is the same as the hells, or many of the hells. It is in a first sphere condition in the spirit world; for that reason any person in the first dimension of the spirit world can access the Earth. If everybody on the Earth were in a second sphere condition then none of the people in the hells would even be able to come to the Earth because just by their coming they would feel so uncomfortable they would have to leave again.

If the collective soul condition of people on Earth moved from the first sphere to the second sphere it would no longer be under negative spirit influence from people in the hells

6.1.3. Negative spirits rule by manipulating people's fear and terror

The reason they feel drawn back to the Earth is that the Earth is very attractive to them because it is of very similar condition. This is the reason they are drawn back. The people who are the rulers are the people who are in the darkest conditions of the hells, and they rule through terror. They have a reign of terror in the depths of hell. Just like how the Jews would have felt in Nazi Germany, or how it would have been to be in Russia during the Stalin years, to be someone who was opposed to the government in the Stalin era; that's the kind of terror that these particular people rule by. It is the same kind of terror that often gets demonstrated on Earth. They have a rule of terror upon all the people who are afraid of them.

Spirits in the hells rule people on Earth through terror

Your fear is a very, very damaging emotion to this world because it allows you to be ruled by others who are willing to manipulate your fear. That's why it is such a damaging emotion. A lot of people would say that rage is the damaging emotion. Well, while rage is damaging, not a single one of us would be able to be ruled by an enraged person unless we have terror, unless we have fear. Every single one of us would stand up firmly to a person who is enraged if we did not have fear. Fear actually enables an enraged person. Every time you act in your fear, you are enabling the people who are the rulers of this darkness and these people are in the spirit world. You are enabling them every time you act in your fear. It's very important to understand that. If we understand that, we start to see the relationship between our terror, or our fear, and what it allows to be created around us. Now they are in the first dimension of the spirit world, as the scripture mentions, they are in the hells of the spirit world, and they have their reign of terror. And as a result of their reign of terror they are able to rule over the Earth by influencing people through terror, through rage. That's how they have control of this planet. [01:59:42.13]

Participant: In a channelling that I had once, I was actually shown the universe where I was looking down upon it. Once the Earth got out of the hells, from the first sphere into the second sphere, I saw the layer of love that God has put around the universe, and these spirits were all floating around and they could not penetrate through it. Around the universe was this darkness of spirits but they couldn't penetrate this layer of love because we had increased our level of love on the Earth. It was a very beautiful sight.

Yes. Remember that I mentioned that every new dimension or sphere is a boundary of love. And these spirits in the hells, although they rule over many people in the world and over many people in the first dimension of the spirit world, they are not able to affect anything above there. They can't affect anyone in the second dimension or the third or fourth or fifth. There are literally huge areas of the spirit world that are perfectly free from any of this negative influence. [02:00:52.11]

Spirits in the hells are not able to manipulate the spheres of love above them

Participant: The vision really showed me that God's Laws and God's Decisions are just beautiful. It was my fear that was holding me where I was. Once that was let go and we could deal with that, it just changed; when everybody did that it just changed everything. Just that one thing changed everything so dramatically for us here on Earth.

That's correct. If we all dealt with the emotion of fear we would not have this situation. That is very true. Many of us, of course, are terrified of dealing with the emotion of fear. We are afraid of being afraid, so we avoid addressing the emotion. [02:01:46.02]

6.2. Standing our ground on the day of evil

Mary: Okay. "Therefore put on the full armour of God so that when the day of evil comes you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything, to stand."

Now for many of you the day of evil is happening every day at the moment. (Laughs) That's the way it is unfortunately. Remember that when we are speaking about "the day of evil" as mentioned in the Bible, later Bible revisionists turned that into being a time of Armageddon, or some kind of cataclysm, or something like that. This is why when a lot of media attack me, one of the first things they say to me is, "You're preaching a cataclysmic thing like all cults," and I say, "No, I'm not. I don't have any fear of the future whatsoever and I'm not preaching that there is some kind of cataclysmic event in the future that is going to harm most of society. I do believe there are going to be some changes on the planet but that is very, very different to feeling that it is cataclysmic or damaging. I certainly have none of those feelings". [02:02:49.12]

Mary: And actually the English Standard Version says, "That you may be able to stand in the evil day."

Yes. "In the evil day" can be any day that you are tempted to do something, to destroy your own relationship with God basically.

6.3. Explaining the armour of God

Mary: So then could you give us an overview of what is meant by this armour of God that we are hearing about?

Well, Paul loved illustrations, as many of you will probably know if you come from a Christian background. What we tried to do is put together an illustration of something that was pretty common in the day, which was a Roman soldier with his suit of armour ready to conquer whatever he viewed as the enemy. The average soldier had a certain amount of gear that he had on him, and if you talk to Cornelius you will find that sometimes the gear was pretty heavy; with the way it was made it could often weigh up to an additional fifty pounds more. It was like carrying around this suit to prevent you from getting injured or harmed of course; that's the primary reason why the suit was available.

What Paul is recommending is that we have a suit of armour that comes from God. This is all about your relationship with God. Each one of these particular pieces that are described in the armour that comes from God will help you in your battle to positively respond to any spirit influence that comes along, or as they say in the verse, "in your battle against the evil forces in the dark places". Now personally my opinion is that they are just human beings. That helps a lot with understanding their underlying motivations and how they feel, but they are still going to attempt to influence you because they want their addictions met. Now some of them want the addiction of power, some of them want sexual addictions; some of them want the addiction of control. All sorts of addictions exist, just like they do here on the Earth, and these addictions are what we are fighting against when it comes to dealing with it. So don't feel that you are fighting against the spirits themselves because you are not, you are fighting against the underlying emotions that these spirits are projecting at you and causing you to change or be influenced in your life. This is what the suit is! [02:05:38.23]

Mary: I'm borrowing the next verse from the New World translation. "Stand firm therefore with your loins girded about this truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness." What does that mean?

Can we just read the verse again? And I'll write on the whiteboard what each one was. There was a shield of faith, a helmet of salvation and the feet were "shod with the good news of the gospel of peace". And the sword was a sword of the Spirit. So here we have a blueprint for how to combat any spirit influence that we may ever come against in our life. It's just a matter of understanding it, like any blueprint.

The armour of God protects us by helping to combat negative spirit influence

7. Girding our loins with truth

The very first one Mary mentioned was the loins girded with truth. What does that mean to you do you think? The loins girded with truth. Why this area? And what relationship has that got to do with truth, do you think?

Participant: It is because the emotions are kind of primarily located around the gut, around the loins?

Well it's actually the bottom two chakra areas that we are talking about here. Now from the metaphysical studies that many of you have done, what are the bottom two chakra areas about? Can you remember? The base chakra was a lot about...? [02:08:23.02]

Participant: It's our foundational belief systems as well as beliefs of the tribe, the family.

Mary: Family belief systems.

Family-related belief systems. Yes, and basically our entire family, which includes our environment of course. What else? What else is that base chakra?

Mary: Sex.

Okay there are some sexual issues here, aren't there, because we don't want to say that. When are you going to get used to talking about sex? (Laughs) Sometime in the distant future.

Participant: When I have some! (Laughter)

When I have some! (Laughs) Up until then I'm not talking about it at all! (Laughs) Okay beliefs, sexuality, anything else from your metaphysics?

Participant: I just thought to confront your fear you need to hold onto some truth.

Yeah but fear is the stomach area generally, that's where we store it in our body.

Participant: I think there is some self-acceptance stuff in the lower chakras.

Okay. Well now we are starting to talk about the second chakra. Self-acceptance with regards to sexuality in the first chakra and general self-acceptance and self-worth in the second chakra. That's where we see all those kinds of things.

Participant: I understand that the base chakra is described as "I am", in terms of "who I feel I am".

Yeah, who I feel I am.

Participant: And if you look at the development of the foetus we start basically at the coccyx, and so it's the basic development, the basic life, and the primordial. I know it primarily as survival.

Yes it's very much about survival. So can we now make some suppositions about what this "loins girded with truth" is about?

Participant: Just your grounding, you standing firm, you grounding your roots.

Yeah. Whose truth is it?

Participant: Well at this stage it's our truth.

Well yes but it really should be God's Truth.

Participant: It should be God's Truth but it's not at the moment.

We are talking about God's Truth here. We want our basic person to be totally grounded in what is the truth from God's perspective. [02:11:39.16]

Participant: Stand firm in the truth.

We want to protect the truth at all costs. Not by our words but by how we act in our day-to-day life. Once we have established a truth in our day-to-day life we want to make sure that we never let that truth go. If we have no idea then we can't do that but once we have an idea about what the truth is now we want it to be established as the truth. [02:12:15.10]

Mary: So would you add to that also the idea of my worth as God's child, my sexuality?

What's the basic truth about your worth as God's child?

Participant: The greatest of His creations.

You are the greatest of His creations. How many times do you believe that? Not very often for many of us but the reality is that we need to stay firm in that grounding of what we know, even if it is intellectual knowledge, that we are the greatest of God's creation. We are a person worth loving, we are a person who is able to be and is currently loved by God, and there is a lot of other truth amongst that.

7.1. God's Truth provides protection from spirit influence

God is a loving individual. God is not a punishing individual. God does not try to make your life hard on purpose. God always loves you in every interaction. All of God's Laws are loving, and these are all truths that we need to keep as a protection of our basic self, that we need to understand about ourselves. You see, while we have these truths protecting our core self, we won't be misled into thinking that somehow we are a person that deserves to be punished for the rest of our life, for example. [02:13:44.08]

Mary: And I know for myself, it's my willingness to drop those truths that has always led me to spirit influence. The feeling that it's okay to punish myself, or the feeling that I'm not really worth anything, the desire to avoid that feeling, and get other feelings from other people, have all been ways where I have discarded God's Truth, sat in my stuff and then wanted spirits to help me out of it.

7.1.1. An example of being protected by the truth that God loves us

Now if I was fully grounded in the basic truth that I am a person who God loves deeply, and I was fully grounded in the other truth that God is a God of love, can you see how much that would protect me from negative spirit influence? How many times do we do something that is completely out of harmony with those two basic truths? In other words, completely out of harmony with the basic truth that God loves you? How many beliefs do you even have currently where you believe that you are not loved, that God does not love you that much, that God does not care about you that much? And how easy is it to manipulate a person who believes that they deserve to be punished? It's pretty easy to manipulate a person who feels like they deserve to be punished, isn't it?

For example, you see a little child and oftentimes a parent is saying, "I'm smacking you because I love you," so they are saying that violence is a fact of love. But here, in this basic truth that we have just stated about punishment, violence is not a fact of love. Imagine how much that would protect the child in that environment? They would say, "Mummy, you can say that you love me but you do not because you belting me at the moment." And they would be able to say that definitely if they felt that inside of themselves; they would not be influenced by such a person. If they just knew that one truth, even a child would not be as influenced if they knew that truth inside of themselves.

Imagine now, as an adult, you know for certain that God is only loving and that you can and should be loved by God, and you are in fact loved by God. Imagine if you knew that for certain. It doesn't matter how much somebody told you how useless you are, how bad you are, or how disappointing you are, you would not believe them, would you? [02:16:29.09]

Almost every single day I generally get a few emails telling me how bad I am, telling me how useless I am. It ranges through all sorts of things, doesn't it, babe?

Participant: From your addiction to your overall underlying evil intentions.

Yeah, and everything in between. And the reality is that my own feeling that I am loved by God prevents me from absorbing those attacks. Just that one feeling. Now if a person has a true complaint with me, many of you now know that you can come and talk to me about it and we can discuss it. But if you are willing to treat me badly in that interaction you also know that I will not do that with you. Why? Because I understand inside of myself more and more, although I still don't understand it perfectly, that each of us deserves to be loved, and that we are actually loved. And no matter how bad you think I am, God still loves me. That's a pretty safe place, isn't it, when you can feel that? No matter how bad somebody else thinks you are, God still loves you.

One of the biggest complaints against normal Christian faiths on the planet is the judgement that comes from the Christian faiths towards people who do what the faith calls "evil things," the judgement towards prostitutes, drunkards, drug addicts, any person who they classify as evil. And I am classified as evil by the same people and so they tell me all the ways in which I am evil as well. In their eyes I'm much less than a prostitute of course, because I am the apostate of all apostates. Now with all of those emotions getting projected at you, imagine how easy it is for a spirit to hook into that and cause you to feel really bad about yourself. But if your loins, your basic sense of yourself, is firmly grounded in this understanding that God loves you and that you are a lovable person; that you can be loved, and you are firmly grounded in who you know yourself to be, you will not get upset with the person attacking you, and you also will not feel as attacked, will you? You will go, "Okay they are allowed to have their own opinion," but you will not change your actions and what you choose to do with your life.

7.2. How to deal with personal attack using God's Truth

Participant: AJ, I'm just wondering how I am going to put this into practice because if I'm getting attacked, I am already intellectually telling myself, "No God loves me, I'm a good person." So it sounds good what you are saying, but how do I put that into practice?

Well there are two very simple things that you need to do. One is to intellectually tell yourself the truth. The truth is that God does love you, and the truth is that this person who is attacking you does not. They are harming you. The second thing you need to let yourself do is feel the attack because if you feel the attack you will actually not change what you do, but you will just allow yourself to feel it and you will release an emotion. And in the process of releasing an emotion you will come to feel this truth, but you first at least have to tell yourself the truth otherwise you will never get to the second part.

You will just go, "Yeah, you are right, I am terrible, I am worthless, I am unworthy to be loved, God doesn't love me, I may as well commit suicide." And then what do you have? You have fifty spirits who have all committed suicide surrounding you saying, "Yeah go for it, you know here is a knife, here is a gun, here's this, here's that," and they will give you all the means to do it, because that's the way they work. But if you tell yourself the truth: "God loves me. What you are telling me is false. I know that because at least I have that intellectual knowledge," and then all you need to do is just allow yourself to feel the attack. In other words have some grief about being attacked by a person who does not love you. That's all you need to do. [02:21:31.13]

Mary: I think, Alex, what you are saying is, "What if I just tell myself the truth and I use that to deny the emotion?" And I know lots of us who have had positive affirmations in our background or whatever, have used a lot of words intellectually to suppress emotion.

Participant: Yes.

Mary: But something that I have really learned from AJ is that he does remind me of truth all the time and it does actually help me feel more. When I am willing to let go of the truth of the situation and go, "Yeah I am a bad person," it just sends me into this downward spiral where a heap of spirits jump on and suddenly I feel dreadful. And it's a lesson I'm learning, to remind myself of truth even if it's intellectually, but to stay focused on humility. It's when we use the intellect to try and avoid humility that nothing works. In my experience the only way that I have ever grown emotionally is to grieve the real situation that is happening. So, not to grieve that I'm a bad person but to grieve, "Gee it hurts that other people are calling me a bad person." [02:22:43.10]

Can you see the difference, Alex? One is a fiction statement: "I am a bad person," but the statement, "They are treating me as if I am a bad person" is not a fiction. That might be a fact. We can only grieve facts, we can't grieve fictions.

Participant: Yeah, I started actually processing anger that I'm in at the moment towards my parents and saying, "God loves me and you didn't." So I feel there is a change around that.

Yep, that's good.

Participant: So yeah, I just wanted some confirmation.

Often I find a person who is being attacked goes into accepting the belief and the belief systems of the person who's attacking them. Sometimes Mary will get a phone call or an email from somebody who attacks her and I just say, "Babe, you are a beautiful person and sure you might have some things to work on, but this person that is attacking you makes them not a very nice person. As soon as they attack you they are not a very nice person. I don't and you don't go around attacking everybody. So you are a more beautiful person than that," and often just my saying that will result in Mary crying. [02:24:00.17]

Mary: It makes me feel like crying now.

Because she feels the recognition of the fact that she doesn't deserve the attack. You see, what the spirits want is to convince you that you do deserve the attack. That's what they want to convince you of. They want to convince you of that, just like your parents wanted to convince you in many cases that you deserve to get the violent belting because you did something that they disagreed with. Many times that's what parents want to convince you of, and that's also what these spirits want to maintain. While they maintain that with you they have control of you, and then all they have got to do is make you feel bad about yourself and you're theirs. You're basically theirs. [02:24:45.08]

You see while you have your loins girded with these beliefs about yourself, that you have an intention to do good and that you have an intention to love and you have an intention to be loving towards other people, these underscoring belief systems are protecting you. And if you have a desire to understand that God loves you, even though you may not feel that yet, it is going to protect you from all this dark attack that will cause you to get into this self-degrading and depressive state, where eventually we just want to top ourselves, to commit suicide, just in order to get away from how bad we feel about ourselves. And often it all began with our unwillingness to just stay firm in the truth that we have already been shown. Can you see the importance of just that one thing? Now how many of you have gone into these spirals? Many of you? Yeah. These spirals are often induced by spirits around you. They want to make you feel bad about yourself.

7.2.1. The example of AJ getting attacked by the media

I have just updated our website and have put a list of my responses to media attacks that have happened in the past on the website. If you look under Media Responses you will see it there on the website. And with the help of Luli, who has been great at getting all of the details together so that we can respond, we have put together some responses. Now if I actually believed everything about myself that the media said about me, I would be an absolute mess. I'd feel pretty bad about myself if everything they said was true. How do you hold onto beliefs about yourself that you know are not true? By grounding them in God's Truth about you. That's how you hold onto it. And it may be an intellectual process initially, but eventually you'll allow yourself to feel the grief of the attacks, and eventually the grief will be gone, and you won't even grieve the attacks anymore. That's eventually where you will arrive, but if that truth is not grounded in you what will you do? You will go, "Oh yeah they are right. I'm a terrible person. Look at me, look at how bad I am." These are the exact messages that many of us grew up with all our life; "Look at how bad you are, you are all to blame," and so forth, and we go into this spiral and the spirits just grab on top of that and chuck us into this spiral because they love to torment a person who is down. That is what they love doing. Just as many people on Earth like to do. You notice that? [02:27:49.25]

7.2.2. An example of a Sikh lady getting attacked on Facebook

Just recently there was a Facebook thing that we heard about, because neither Mary nor I are on Facebook, of a woman who was a Sikh.

Mary: That was a nice story. It was a Sikh lady who, because of her going through a certain process in her faith, she has to wear five or seven signs of her faith but also she cannot modify her personal appearance.

She's not allowed to change her personal appearance under the guidelines of her own faith.

Mary: It's about being focused on service rather than appearance, and she had quite a lot of facial hair that she was not removing.

She has what looks like a beard.

Mary: It was almost like a beard. Obviously she has breasts but she also has this sort of beard. And somebody took a photo of her waiting in line somewhere and this whole campaign started on Facebook, taunting her.

Attacking her, making fun of her, making fun of her facial hair and just attacking her, attacking her, attacking her!

Mary: But a beautiful thing resulted in that she had this feeling about herself and she heard about it and she responded.

She actually put a response on the page.

Mary: Yes, saying, "This is actually me, and this is the reason why I look like this, and this is what I believe," and she actually kind of flipped the entire interaction around. The person who posted the photo ended up writing to her to apologise and a number of people who had been cruel to her on the page went out of their way to apologise to her. So it was also a lovely example of love overcoming evil. But she was very grounded in the fact of, "I am who I am. This is what I believe in and I don't feel bad or ashamed about that." [02:29:52.21]

It's a fantastic illustration of somebody who would not accept the attacks of others just because others believed a certain thing.

Participant: My understanding is that the second chakra is about our relationship with others as well. I read that story and she was so loving in her description of the truth, and I feel that another important thing about girding our loins with truth is being steadfast in our actions to be loving towards others. [02:30:38.04]

Yes, I agree.

Mary: That will come later.

7.2.3. An example of spirits projecting at a woman that she is sexually dirty

Participant: So, AJ, just in relation to what you are talking about with the attack of spirits, can I use the example of someone who is murdered?

Can I use your example?

Participant: Sure.

You have a history of; shall we call it, sexual promiscuity?

Participant: Yes.

You feel ashamed of that.

Participant: Yes.

The spirits with you want you to feel ashamed of that.

Participant: Yes.

Every time they attack you, because you are unwilling to feel the shame itself, you then feel what they are saying to you.

Participant: Yes. (The participant starts crying)

You feel that you are the dirty woman that they are saying you are.

Participant: Yes.

This then causes you to act in a manner that causes you to engage in further promiscuity, which is exactly what they want, because they can share in the act and do all sorts of things with that. [02:31:47.10]

Participant: Yes.

This is an example of what I'm saying. See, if you understood that you are loved by God, and that you are not a dirty woman, but there are things that have happened in the past that have happened because of your upbringing and other issues and problems that you faced, that this does not define you, it is only something that happened to you, if you understood that and if you firmly understood this truth about that every time these spirits attacked you, you wouldn't then go down into a spiral of doing what they want. [02:32:21.11]

Participant: Yes.

Yes. Now does that answer the question you were going to ask?

Participant: Thanks.

No worries. Interesting of how we often want to use an example of somebody else. It's far more powerful if we relate it to ourselves.

7.3. Having judgement or other emotions associated with certain words

Participant: AJ, in the Prayer where it says, "...influence of the evil ones..." I am in a real quandary about that. One is that I am coming to the understanding that everybody is my brother and sister, that I need to have compassion for my brothers and sisters, and I just feel that phrase as a biblical term or as a judgement. Is that just my upbringing? Because I go into grief when I read that every time. I feel as if they're spirits that need my compassion and my love and every time I read that I get very upset by it. [02:33:18.28]

Okay. Let's look at that as well because it is an important thing that you raised. The English language has a word, and then it has a meaning. Almost every language is the same, by the way; it has a word and a meaning. There is no judgement associated with a word in a dictionary. Do you understand? The dictionary itself is just a piece of paper with a word and a meaning, that's all it is. There is no emotion coming out of the dictionary. [02:33:53.22]

So when we use the word "evil", is that not a word in the English language? Yes of course it is. It is a valid word in that it describes acts that are taken that damage or violently harm other people, doesn't it? And usually when we look at the term it's not a mistaken act, it is something that is purposefully done in order to damage or harm another person; that's our definition of evil. That definition is the exact definition I want to use. I don't have any judgement about the person who engages in evil but the reality is that they are engaged in an act that is evil.

Participant: So for me to get so upset by it, I must have a judgement myself?

Yes. There must be some kind of judgement coming from somewhere into your life related to that word.

Participant: My Christian upbringing.

Yes, very much so. When we were young children and we did something mistakenly, we'd go, "Oh mummy I just did this," and often you did not even know what you did. You don't know whether it was right or wrong but you just feel bad about it, and they go, "You evil person, God said about evil persons..." and off they go. So now you have a connotation about the word, which is just a word defining an act in the dictionary. See, we were often mistakenly or purposefully accused of evil when we ourselves had never engaged in it. [02:35:32.12]

Participant: I had got to the stage where I was thinking maybe I considered myself evil.

No. You have been accused of evil when you felt it was unfair and so now whenever you hear the word evil you instantly go, "It's unfair." Instant reaction. The reality is that it is just a word that's in the English language. Just because we use a word, it does not mean that we have a feeling of judgement. The feeling of judgement comes from our feelings towards the person. If I said to you that these people who engage in evil are the degradation of society and they deserve to be condemned to eternal torment in the hellfire, and off I went like that, now I would be judging them. I would be judging their evil, which is neither my right nor the truth. That is very different to the word itself. And the problem is that in our history many of us have had these judgements perpetrated towards ourselves personally, so then when we hear a certain word we instantly go into some kind of reaction. [02:36:51.18]

Many of you did that with the word God, if you remember. Do you remember the very first interactions we had? Many of you went into a meltdown when you heard the word God coming from my lips. That is another word that describes the Universal Creator. I could have used the word Universal Creator and everyone would have been happy. (Laughter)

Participant: You wanted to trigger us, didn't you?

No I did not want to trigger you; I just wanted to use the dictionary definition of the Universal Creator in the shortest possible language, which is "g", "o" and "d". (Laughs) Why use the long word when the short one would do? Why would I want to say the male/female Universal Creator when all I need to say is God? You need to get over it. (Laughs)

So the thing with words is that we need to understand that words are used to correctly describe a physical description of something. That's all their purpose is. If we feel a judgement from the word, then there is something in our history that has happened associated with that word. Most probably we were called that word, either mistakenly or on purpose, when we did not feel like we were bad, and we often believed it. Yes, how many times when you were a child were you called bad or evil and you came to believe it? That's the trouble. And it might not even be a parent; it could be a school teacher.

You might have gone to a Catholic School or some religious school and they associated evil and wicked and devil and everything else all together, and you were evil when you did that naughty thing. And you were thinking that you were doing something very simple and basic and now the whole world was coming down on you, and God was coming down on you as well, and now of course you are going to have some emotions about that. [02:38:59.14]

When Mary and I use words, we are using the word because that is the word. For example, it's blasphemous to assume that God is a God of punishment. Now what do we normally associate with the word blasphemous? We actually think that we are going to be punished, that it's going to be eternal torment, and that blasphemy is the worst possible sin that you could know. But when we are committing blasphemy, the word actually means that we are misrepresenting the truth about the individual to a deeply negative extent, when we are claiming something about the person that is not true. It is just a word. It's the same with many other words that we could use. [02:39:52.21]

Mary: Another good example is: we had a lot of discussion at Book Group about there being a penalty upon the soul, and the definition of penalty is "A restriction placed upon you as a result of an action that you take." But it obviously carries a lot of emotion for a lot of people, that we would be penalised, and this feeling that it is about strict harsh punishment. In the end I think I said, "There is a penalty. Let's move on."

There's the word.

Mary: There's the word and then there are the emotions.

Yeah. So if you have an emotional response to different words always look at what happened in your childhood because there is usually some kind of link between these particular things. And usually it's related to injustice of some kind that we experienced as a child. [02:40:40.29]

7.4. Summary of the meaning of "girding our loins with truth"

That was a little digression. We are focused on the loins girded with truth. It sounds very biblical, does it not? And of course it is. So do you understand the importance of that in terms of combating spirit influence? Can you see how spirits want you to shift in your perspective of truth?

Now there are certain things that you don't know. Like, how many of you know how the cells replicate, and how fast they replicate, and all those kinds of things at the moment? Not many. You admit that there are certain things that you don't know. Okay. Obviously there is quite a lot we don't know. You can't be firm about things you don't know. So don't try to be firm about things you don't know. That is not what we are suggesting here. What we are suggesting is that the truth has to be God's Truth that you have personally come to know at least intellectually and preferably emotionally.

One of these basic truths is that God is a God of love. Now you might not know that yet! You might be assuming that God is not a God of love, or God is a God of love at different times. So when a spirit comes along and says, "Oh God's going to punish you," you go, "Maybe he's right." Can you see that that's an automatic hole that they can now manipulate? So we have got to be careful with these particular things that we don't know the truth about as yet.

But what I'm suggesting to you is, even if you can intellectually accept the truth that all of us are equal, therefore all of us are capable of being loved, particularly if we have pure intentions and we don't go out and automatically try to do evil things, that we are trying to be people who are good, even by our own definition, we can at least have some sense of ourselves in that place. And so when someone else comes along and says, "You bad, bad, bad person," we won't accept their definition of us under those circumstances.

If you do, you will notice how quickly that becomes a very negative downward spiral influenced by spirits. It's happened to many of you already, has it not? Where you have just sort of rescued yourself after being right, right down there. And that's because of not having this firmness for one belief. Just one belief about yourself that you are worthy to be loved and God does love you. Just that one belief. Can you see how important this is?

7.4.1. Protecting ourselves in areas of sexuality

It will also help protect you with regard to areas of sexuality as well. Many of us are misled by our sexual desires. Many of you have entered relationships with a person you have claimed is your soulmate, only to learn a few months later that that person was not your soulmate. And you have begun the relationship on that basis. Why did you do that? Because you were influenced by something sexual where you don't have integrity, because if you had integrity you would not have done that.

So, this is where truth, God's Truth can protect us. If we have integrity to God's Truth and we have a sense of self worth, we would never engage with another person sexually unless we were certain that we wanted to have a permanent relationship with them. Now if each of you were certain that you wanted to have a permanent relationship with the person you are engaging with sexually, do you think a one night stand would be possible? Well it might be because if you want to have them for the rest of your life you have to start with the first night (laughs), however it's not going to be something where you go to one person the next night, and another the next night and the next night, is it? None of those kinds of things would happen because you would have some sense of self-worth. And this is very important to understand. While you have a sense of your own worth you will be very hard to manipulate. Spirits love manipulating you and they manipulate through the lack of sense of your own worth. This is why Mary and I are constantly trying to share with you, "You are worthy of love, God loves you." It's just a matter of desiring this love and the love can enter you. [02:45:25.06]

These are truths that are very important to understand because they will help you to maintain a sense of self-worth. You will not put up with attack. You will not put up with other people trying to destroy you in that place because you will have a sense of worth. Does everyone grasp the meaning of that? It's a pretty good idea of how we can combat spirit influence, so you know if we just develop that one thing, imagine how much less influence we would be under. [02:46:15.16]

8. The breastplate of righteousness

Mary: Okay. Next one. We have the belt of truth buckled around our waist, our loins are girded with truth, and 'the breastplate of righteousness' on.

Okay. What does the breastplate protect? Not just our heart but all of our vital organs. If somebody put a sword in and punctured your lung, if you did not have quick support within four to five minutes you would probably be dead. And obviously if they hit your heart then that's a very serious issue. So we are talking about a heart and other vital organs that are assigned to our instant life or death. If we get punctured in other organs it might take a longer time to pass, but if we were in a war, imagine back in the old Roman times, you would want to protect these organs good and proper wouldn't you? If you got hit in any of those vital organs back then there would be a high likelihood that you would die within five minutes.

A breastplate protects vital organs such as our heart and lungs

So what is it the breastplate of? Righteousness. It's not the breastplate of self-righteousness, it's not that. So it's not about the self. It's the breastplate of righteousness. Now how does right protect the heart? What is our seated motivation? What causes us to do things? Desire.

We often say that desires come from the heart because they are motivated by the emotions of passion and longing, yes? That's where our desires come from. If you desire something fully you can feel it in your heart. What does it mean to have a heart that is protected by righteousness? [02:48:53.08]

8.1. Righteousness is having ethics, morality and integrity

Mary: What is righteousness?

Participant: It means that you're in harmony with God's Laws.

Yes. Let's be even more specific. How many times do you ask yourself in the course of a day, "Is what I'm doing now the right thing to do?" What if everyone had that feeling of "What's the right thing to do here?" What do we mean by right?

Participant: Just what's ethical and moral.

Ethical and moral, but who defines that?

Participant: From God's perspective.

But you don't talk to God yet do you? So how do you know?

Participant: I just know for myself that if I'm about to do something that's clearly not loving or I've misread something I feel like something just doesn't feel right. [02:50:05.13]

Perhaps what we need to do then is define wrong. (Laughs) What do we mean when we do something wrong? Does a murderer know what's wrong?

Participant: Yeah I think they do.

Do you reckon? I don't know about that. See, if he's brought up to believe that it's right all of his life, then how does he know what's wrong?

Participant: Is it like when you died the people thought that they were doing the right thing?

Exactly. Many of the people who were on the Sanhedrin said that they were doing the right thing. They didn't have any animosity towards me as an individual; they just felt they were doing the right thing, getting rid of a person who was an agitator.

Mary: If you were to look back on your life and think about the wrong things you did, how would you identify them? What would be the markers of them?

Participant: I think you are referring to the Golden Rule?

That is part of determining what is wrong or right.

Participant: Is it loving, is it as simple as 'is it loving'?

It is. "Would I want the same thing done to me?" is a very good question, isn't it? "Would I want the same thing that I'm considering doing, done to me?" That's a very good way of determining what is right, yes.

Participant: A good feedback system is how much pain it caused to you and everybody else.

It's not always a good feedback system because a lot of people around would always say, "Yes you are causing me lots of pain," when you are not doing anything wrong. So it's not always a good feedback system is it?

Mary: But I admit you can look at it.

You can look at it, but it's not always exactly the truth.

Participant: Integrity?

Yes, having integrity is definitely involved in what is righteous, I agree. And integrity is a lot about this ethical thing: "What would I like done to me? Am I willing to do to others something that I would not like done to me?"

So you are driving along and all of a sudden you have a bout of anger and you just want to smash the car in front of you. Obviously you would not like somebody to say to you, "Oh yeah I smashed into the back of your car because I just had the longing to do it." (Laughs) It would not be very nice, would it? So you would go, "Okay, I better not do that particular thing. It would not be right for me to do that." [02:52:56.23]

Participant: When you did the wrong thing there were consequences or punishment.

Yeah, but unfortunately we got punished when we were children for a lot of things that we did that weren't wrong, but rather somebody else did not like us doing it so we got punished. So it's not always a good way of deciding, is it?

The question I'm asking is "How do we determine it from God's perspective?"

Participant: Through your relationship with God.

Through your relationship with God obviously, yes, and that is all about receiving some more of God's Love and then God's Love will show you what is right and wrong in that process. But oftentimes, there are two layers of questions we need to ask here.

The very first thing that was said was about this issue of what was ethical and moral. Now, remember I gave a talk in Melbourne called "The Human Soul - Ethics and Morality". I don't know if you have heard that but I defined ethics and I defined morality in that talk. My suggestion is to have a look at that talk again if you can't remember it and look at what is ethics and what is morality. We have talked a lot about ethics, and morality is a lot about God's definition of what is right. And that is only through experience that we can gain that definition. Unfortunately for many of us, determining what is right must first be based on ethics and eventually it will be based on morals. Now let me give you some examples.

8.2. Being righteous involves asking, "Would I like this to be done to myself?"

8.2.1. An example of being ethical in sexual interactions

Let's say I have no idea what God feels about any matter whatsoever. And I've got this opportunity to have sex with somebody's partner. She's offered herself to me, and she's pretty attractive, she's got a nice body and everything's looking good. She's in agreement and I'm in agreement. I might go down the track of, "I'm not hurting anybody," but now let's ask myself the question: "If I was in a relationship how would I like for my partner to have sex with somebody else?" I probably would not like it. So if that's the case, ethics would demand that I don't engage sexually with this person. Can you see that? I might not have any other sense of morality, I might not know what is right or what is wrong in this particular situation, but just that one ethical principle of, "I would not want it done to me," would prevent me from acting out of harmony with that principle. So, we could say that the first point of righteousness is asking myself the basic question, "Would I like this to be done to me?" [02:56:09.12]

Now you imagine if every single time you went to do something you asked yourself that one question, can you see it would be pretty hard for a spirit to influence you, wouldn't it? You might have fifty spirits around all wanting you to have sex with that person, because they might be able to share in the act or they want to create havoc in your life, and they want to see the slow destruction of your life through all of these different relationships. Whatever it is that is their motive, just that one question, "Would I like this done to me?" and honestly answered "No, I wouldn't," would stop me from acting, just that one question.

Now that is different to the question, "What is actually right?" isn't it? What if that person is your soulmate and you are meant to be with them for the rest of your life, and you don't know this at this point in time? Then you might start to tell yourself, "It's right to have a relationship with her because I think she's my soulmate, I should go ahead with that. And if that's going to cause a break up of their marriage that's going to be good," and you come up with all this justification without asking yourself the question, "Would I like this done to me?" And this is where we go oftentimes. We go down a path that is definitely not ethical, where there are no ethics involved. Now even if we just deal with the ethical question we will be more righteous. [02:58:20.01]

Mary: But we must still desire true righteousness.

I agree. But at the beginning of any endeavour we generally don't know. Do you know for certain that it's only right to have a relationship with one person?

Mary: Yes.

How many of you feel you know that for certain? That's very few. The rest of you could easily cheat on somebody if you don't know that for certain, can you see that? So there has to be something else guiding your actions that is not going to be influenced by spirits, and ethics will do that for you. Having a sense of ethics will do that.

Once this soulmate part of you opens you will feel the rightness of that statement, but until that point you won't feel that. So something else has to guide your behaviour in righteousness, and that's why I'm saying that this particular statement or question, "Would I like this done to me?" is a very good guideline for what is righteous. And it protects your heart. It protects your desires. In other words you can recognise your desires and then see which desires are out of harmony with ethics and which desires are in harmony with ethics. If the desire is in harmony with ethics then you might proceed with your desire, but if your desire is obviously out of harmony with ethics, then you would have to question why you're proceeding down the track of following that desire, wouldn't you? [03:00:16.07]

8.2.2. An example of being enraged with someone

Let's say your desire is to go into a rage with somebody because of what they did. If I ask myself the question, "Would I like a person to be enraged with me?" Probably not. Then I would have to go, "Okay my desire to be in a rage with them is out of harmony with ethics, therefore it is not righteous if I engage it." In other words, "If I follow along with this desire to be in a rage, that's out of harmony with ethics." How many spirits do you think are going to be with me doing this? There's going to be lots of spirits with me doing this and before I know it, I'm not only in a rage but I'm in what's called a blind rage because I'm so over-cloaked by spirits, enraged by the situation, that I now have no sense of reason. And that's what happens when we get out of harmony with this righteous protection of our heart. We get out of harmony with any sense of reason. It is very important to understand that. [03:01:26.03]

Mary: Therein lies the distinction: if our desires are led by righteousness then we will be safe from spirit harm. However, if we just let ourselves be led by desire without any measure of righteousness then we can end up in a very spirit-influenced state.

Yes, very much so. We might not even know from God's perspective what is right at this point, and let's face it, many of us are not yet in such a connection with God that we know what God feels on separate subjects. But most of us are in a state where we do know what we feel about a certain subject, and you know when it would hurt you if somebody did something to you. So this is a very good question to start with. [03:02:19.22]

Now once you receive more and more Divine Love you will have a sense of morals from God's perspective. But when you begin that won't be the case, you will just have ethics to guide you. Ethics will guide and protect your heart. It's like the breastplate protecting anybody from being able to manipulate your own desires against yourself. Many of us are being influenced by spirits through our own desires that are out of harmony with ethics. We are induced into doing something that we often regret later because of our own desire being out of harmony with ethics; we have not asked ourselves the basic question, "Would I like to have this done to me?"

Once you ask yourself that question your heart becomes very protected by righteousness. And once your heart becomes that protected it is very hard for a spirit to manipulate your desires that are out of harmony with love because the only way they can manipulate desires out of harmony with love is for you to be out of harmony with ethics.

This is a very powerful tool at your disposal to actually protect your heart, protect your motivations, to protect your desires, to acknowledge when your desires are out of harmony with the ethical stand that determines righteousness. It's a very powerful tool! [03:04:17.13]

Imagine now if you added that to the previous protection we talked about. You now have your loins girded with this truth that you are very fixed and firm about your own sense of worth, and about what your underlying capacity is as an individual, and that God loves you, that God does not desire to punish you and harm you. And at the same time you have this breastplate that is protecting your heart from your own negative desires. It's protecting your heart from your own desire to act out of harmony with love. There are two great big holes that are now covered over that spirits cannot influence you with.

The spirits can't come along and say, "Yeah go along with that, go on, do that," with you going," Yeah, that's what I want to do. I'll go and do that." A spirit can't influence you to do that because you ask yourself, "I want to do that but is that ethical? No it's not, I can't do it, damn it!" (Laughs) You might feel some sense of disappointment that you can't do it, but at least you can now acknowledge, and if you take it one step further, you can start to feel about the desire that you have now noticed that is not ethical. You can actually let yourself feel the desire, where it came from, what its source was, who taught you it, why you believe it, what addiction you get met by following that desire. You can ask yourself all those questions now, if you wanted to. It's a very powerful tool. [03:05:59.02]

Positively Responding to Spirit Influence: Part 2

Okay so how do you feel it going with this topic so far? Good?

Mary: Do you think we should just recap the verse that we've talked about thus far?

Sure, let's proceed with that.

Mary: "Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

When they say, "our struggle", many of you feel that with spirits that it is a struggle. It's not like there's a war, it's just a struggle between people who have different ideals, motivations than what we ourselves have, and so it becomes a struggle as a result of that. [00:05:51.13]

Mary: "Therefore put on the full armour of God so that when the day of evil comes you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace."

So that's the next one, isn't it, the feet? So far we understand the loins being girded with truth; we understand that there is quite a lot of meaning in that isn't there? And then with the breastplate we understand the importance of guarding the motivations of your heart, and we talked about the couple of ways that we can do that, in particular the way of using ethics as a guide until such time as you know what God's morals are about the subject. I'm not suggesting to you that you've got to read a book like the Bible and then say, "Yeah well the Bible said that I've got to do this and that, so that then becomes my moral stance." I'm not suggesting that's possible actually. What I'm suggesting is, there is the ethical stance that is possible right from the beginning of knowing something and the moral stance will come later. As you develop in love you will have more and more of God's morality enter you so therefore you will be able to determine for yourself what is moral.

But remember you have no right really to determine what is right for anyone else. This is very important for you to understand. You only have the right to determine what is right for yourself. Obviously there are certain things that are ethical for the entire of society and society has the ethical right to determine what is right for society. That is a normal situation but you cannot impose your desires onto other people, and to do so would be unloving. We've got to forget about doing that, but we do need to have an ethical stance in our own life. It's very important. [00:08:06.09]

9. Having feet fitted from the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace

So let's come to this gospel of the good news of peace with our foot shod with it. Why our feet? What do our feet do for us?

Participant: Direction.

They give you direction, I agree.

Participant: Just to lead us in the right way.

Right, so could you say that your heart feels something and then your feet take you to it?

Participant: That's what I was going to say - movement.

Good, so the direction in which we move is often indicated by our feet. Now have you ever taken off your shoes and then tried to walk through prickle bushes or whatever? It's pretty uncomfortable unless you have a very thick layer of skin underneath. [00:09:23.03]

I have a friend who lives in Canada and he's able to do that because he has a very thick layer of skin on the soles of his feet because he does not wear shoes. But aside from that it's very, very difficult at times to walk through a place that's full of prickles and everything else.

Okay, so what do shoes do for our feet? They protect them.

Participant: Support.

Support them, what else? They protect and support but if you think about that a little bit further, how often do you use your feet? All the time; every time you're walking, standing, everything, isn't it? Everything is about your feet taking you to the place where you want to be, isn't it? You see that? Okay. Now how does that relate to peace? [00:10:27.17]

Participant: It's like you were saying before about the person who's afraid of whatever it was, and they get taken...

A person afraid of violence.

Participant: Yes but they go to a rally.

They went to a riot, not a rally, which is obviously violent.

Participant: So your feet take you in whichever path you're treading, whether you choose to go with the violence or the other way.

Yes. There is an interesting comment in another part of the Bible, which says, "Do not have feet that run to badness." What do you think that might mean?

Participant: It tells me that you kind of have a choice.

Yes, always. And for feet that run to badness, what kind of choice would we be making? (Laughs) It's pretty obvious; we need to think about our choices. We need to ask ourselves, are our choices peaceful or are our choices automatically not peaceful? Do our choices create peace not only for ourselves but for other people too? And not only other people but also the environment? [00:12:14.12]

Peace is a beautiful quality. I don't know if you've noticed that every society that lives in peace generally grows very rapidly. Every society that lives with war or violence often remains completely stagnant for many, many years. Have you noticed that historically? You can see that with different countries.

If we personally have feet that are always running in the direction of peace, can you see that when violent situations come up our first response isn't going to be there to stand and fight, or to be rebellious, or to attack, or any of these kinds of things. Our first response will be to act in harmony with the peace that we feel. That will be our first response. Now how does that protect us from spirits?

9.1. Reasons that dark spirits want to negatively influence people

What condition are the spirits in that want us to act out of harmony with peace? And don't just say dark to me! What's the condition they are in?

Participant: They're actually wanting to be violent.

They want violence, yes. Why do they want violence? What does violence do for them?

Participant: They can feel powerful.

Good.

Participant: A false sense of power.

Right. So they choose violence. Because it feels powerful to them, and they are looking for power. What else are they looking for? What else is somebody who's in a rage with you, violent with you, attempting to achieve? Control. What else? There are many emotions you've had to start looking at yourself. What do you feel when somebody's in a rage with you? Fear. Why would they like you to feel fear? Well some people just like you to feel fear because it's funny. Have you noticed that? Some people like you to feel fear because they get a laugh out of it. [00:14:49.16]

Many of you have grown up in families who gave you fearful experiences, just so they could have a laugh. How many times did a brother or a sister, often a brother perhaps, do something to you just so that he could have a laugh and see the fear inside of you? Can you see that often they not only want power and control, but they want to humiliate? You see, when a person is terrified, they will do all sorts of things they would not normally do. You will degrade yourself when you are terrified, just because you are terrified of what another person may do to you. And these kinds of spirits love to see the degradation of another person at their own hands. These are quite dark emotions, I agree, but they are the kinds of emotions that drive this violence. [00:15:51.23]

9.2. Making a stand for peace includes not responding to violence with fear

Now if we have inside of us an automatic desire for peace, can you see that we will not respond to violence? And neither would we engage violence ourselves. One of our biggest issues at present is that although many of you are engaging violence less, you are wanting to be in fewer rages with others and you are trying to look at your rage and feel it yourself now rather than project it onto others, but how many of you still respond with fear to the rage in another? You see if we have feet that are really connected with peace, then we will never be responding to anything that would not cause peace. And if we did that not only would we never act violently towards another person but we would never condone violence towards ourselves. We would never allow a person to continually violate ourselves without actually doing something about it, saying something, voicing something about it. It doesn't mean that we would fight them because that would be violent, but we do need to make a stand for peace. And it's interesting that even the statement "Making a stand for peace" involves your feet.

Participant: And when you just said making a stand for peace, you are actually standing on your soul.

It is a pretty interesting play on words, is it not?

You see many of us have been willing in the past to act violently towards others. We have been angry with others, which is an act of violence, and at times we have even been physically violent towards others, particularly our own children. That is often something that is agreed to in society. But now we have worked our way through a bit of that. However for many of us we are still not working our way through our own fear of other people's violence towards ourselves and we need to address this if we are truly going to make a stand for peace, because the problem with not addressing that particular emotion is that you will be able to be manipulated into violence by other people; either violence towards yourself or towards others if you do not make a stand for peace. [00:18:58.16]

Mary: Can you see why we love this verse so much? There is so much strength in it.

9.2.1. The difference between making a stand for peace and keeping the peace

Participant: I can see how through my own experiences that sometimes you feel you are making a stand for peace but actually you are just acquiescing to other people's actions. You do things to keep the peace, rather than make a disturbance.

Yes. See when we keep the peace we are often making compromises of truth and of righteousness. When we make a stand for peace we are not compromising truth or righteousness; we are actually living in harmony with the ethics that we believe in, whatever those ethics are. Our unwillingness to run to violence means that we are also in harmony with truth and righteousness in that state. Our willingness to accept violence means that we are out of harmony with righteousness; we are trading off our fear for acceptance of violence. When I say "trading off", we are actually bartering with people who are violent to lessen our own fear.

Many of you still feel this way even with your families and your neighbours without you really realising. How many of you have openly disclosed the truth about your life to every single person who knows you? Surely the only reason why you wouldn't do that is fear, isn't it? What are you afraid of? You are afraid of their potential violence, their potential attack of you, which is a violent act. Why would you be afraid of that? Because you have this internal system where you believe that violence rules. And while you believe that, you will allow it to rule. So when anybody gets angry with you, instead of staying firm for peace, you will cower in fear. And that's neither righteous nor truthful, nor is it being peaceful. In that place what we are doing is enabling the violent act, we are allowing people who are being violent to continue being violent without even saying anything about it. [00:21:51.26]

This is one reason why I began to respond to the media lately because I realised that by not responding I was allowing violent acts and untruth to go uncorrected, and this is not a very good thing to do. It is amazing how much we do it though.

9.2.2. An example of an interaction with the media

Recently we had an interview with a man who was from the media and he was quite condescending, belittling and judgemental, and generally pretty difficult to be with. He interviewed a group of ten people on the first day. Every time he asked a question that he did not want to hear the answer to, when the answer was not what he expected, he just dismissed the question, did not write down anything. He just dismissed it and rolled onto the next one. Any time that he got something that he wanted to hear he wrote it down. So he was very, very selective in his hearing as well. In this process, every single person who was present felt dismissed, uncomfortable, condescended to and belittled. This is what they told us afterwards. I think only three of them have actually said that to him. [00:23:12.02]

Mary: Can we say that only one of them said it to him in the situation?

And only one said it to him in the situation. So this demonstrates some things. If you include Mary and myself, there were twelve being interviewed. One person said something to him in the situation, one person said something to him immediately after the situation, three more said something to him during the course of events afterwards, but that still leaves seven people who said nothing. Now I'm not suggesting to those seven people that you now go and say something, what I'm saying is, "Why do we do that?" Why do we not say something to the person who did it, but we're willing to say something to people who had nothing to do with it? It's because we're afraid, because we're not willing to make a stand and have our feet run in the direction of peace. We are so afraid of potential further attack that we do not just say what is right and what is truthful.

Many of you have seen on internet forums, when somebody has said something that is obviously totally in error about myself and Mary, some of you have timidly got on the forum and have gone, "Oh but that's not really true," and then just got five, ten, fifteen people all just attacking you. And what do you feel like after that? You even feel, "Maybe I am wrong." (Laughs) Have you noticed that? You almost start believing that because they are the angry people attacking you they must have a righteous anger and that there is something they believe that must actually be true. You even lose a sense of what the actual truth is, through this attack. And this is something that happens regularly. This is one of the reasons why un-peaceful or violent actions still continue on the planet; because the people who are peaceful are not willing to stand up for the peace. There are many more people who are peaceful on this planet than there are violent ones. I know many of you may not believe that but that is a fact, I believe. However, the big problem that those peaceful people have is that they are afraid of the violence. And because they are afraid of the violence they allow it to continue without standing up. [00:26:05.21]

Now let's relate that to spirit influence. If you're afraid of potential attack from any person you cannot see and you don't have these feet that run in the direction of peace and take you in the direction of peace every time, can you see that the fear that you feel under from these spirits can actually even cause you to change the direction of your life and go in a completely different direction to what you want, just to avoid their attack? And that's what happens to many people that we see.

9.2.3. The parable of sowing the seed

There is a lovely scripture about this in the Bible, the one about the sowing of the seed.

Mary: Then he told them many things in parables saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow, but when the sun came up the plants were scorched and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns which grew up and choked the plants, still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop one hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear." [00:27:44.28]

So what's that parable about do you think? What would the seed be in the illustration? Truth.

The seed is the seed of truth, that initial spark of mixture of desire and truth, where you have a desire for truth. The soil is the condition of your heart. So we spread out the soil, but it's on the beaten path, so the seed doesn't get a proper root system, it doesn't get enough moisture. It might just grow a little but then the animals or the birds just come down and pick it up. What do the birds represent do you think? [00:29:17.00]

Participant: Spirits.

Well it could be spirits. It could be any person who's prepared to act violently towards you, and they will often affect whether this "seed of truth" will grow in you or not. That's the reality. Many times we have seen people respond to the truth for a period of time and then, through the attack from others, completely ignore it from that point onwards. We see the attack and as soon as the attack occurs the person just goes off the truth completely. We have seen many millions of people do this over the course of our life. We have seen many thousands of people do this over the last four or five years, where they've come along, felt the "seed of truth" grow in their heart and then as soon as there's a little environmental pressure, and by that I mean attacks from family, friends, the environment, the media whatever, bang it's gone. Now if we have a longing to be led in the direction of peace then can you see we would never respond to a violent attack, verbal or otherwise? We would never change the direction where we are going just because somebody has acted violently towards us. [00:31:05.15]

Many of you have seen the movie "Gandhi", yes? You remember some of the examples in his early days when he was in Africa? He just encouraged all the people who had a tendency towards violence. He encouraged them and said, "Look, if you do that then they will just have an excuse to fight you back. What we need to do is stand firm for peace but also for the principle of truth." Remember that? Many of them got beaten, there were all those men and then they had a heap of women patching them up and even putting them back in line. That takes a lot of bravery, to be able to continually do that until the point is made. But this is the kind of love that we are going to need to have for peace.

Now if somebody is attacking you or anyone else can you see that if we accede to it or if we finish up going along with the attack all we're doing is enabling the violent act? We are not running now in the direction of peace, we're now running in the direction of allowing violence. So even though we ourselves may not personally perpetrate a violent act by running in the direction of violence, because of our fear we have lost direct control of our own feet. And that's what we need to bear in mind. [00:32:32.26]

9.2.4. Peace is one of the fruits of love

Mary: In the English Standard Version, this part of the verse says, "...and as shoes for your feet having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace." So how can we prepare, or make ourselves ready, to act in peace? When we hear about the gospel of peace, is that then relating to truth again that we make ourselves ready to act in peace?

Well there's another scripture in the Bible, which is very nice as well and talks about the "fruits of the spirit." I don't know if you've ever heard it?

But we could actually compare it to: what are the fruits of love? One of the fruits of love is peace. There are also others. When we are truly loving there are a lot of different things that we would normally do, but one of the things that we would normally do is be peaceful. We need at some point to develop a readiness to be peaceful. Can you see from the discussion that we've had already about this issue we are going to have to confront fear to be peaceful? Have many of you thought about that before? It's an amazing concept that you actually have to confront fear to remain peaceful.

You think about the situation with Gandhi and the people who were supporting him; they had to confront huge amounts of fear in order to stand there and allow themselves to be beaten without moving. They also had to confront an emotion in them of wanting to act violently in return; they just had to stay unified in that place. There are a number of different emotions they had to confront. And this is what I believe develops the heart; being able to stand in a place where violence is being perpetrated towards you without acting violently in return takes a lot of courage and it also means that you will feel some fear. You will actually release fear in the process. The less fear you have the more willing you are to stand for peace. [00:35:02.26]

You wanted to say something too, babe.

Mary: I was going to say something about fear; how our willingness to do all three of the things that we have talked about so far; "To guard our heart in righteousness, to guard our loins with truth and to stand for peace," all of those things will bring us to a point where we confront fear. And really the only way we are ever going to be trustworthy people, people of integrity, peaceful people, is if we're willing to confront fear. If we're not willing to deal with fear there will come a point where fear is too much and we'll do something that's out of integrity. It means people won't be able to trust us, that we won't live the life we say we believe in, if we're not actually willing to come up to fear, face it and move through it.

The least trustworthy people on the planet, I believe, are the people who are in the most fear; because you can actually make a person who is in fear do almost anything. That's the fact. All you need to do is provide them with the stimulus and they will change whatever their mind is at the time to be completely different and their action will be out of harmony with love. [00:36:24.22]

Mary: And remember, at the beginning we started talking generally about how to respond positively to spirit influence and a lot of you said fear. We know it's about fear and we have got to deal with fear. And we said hang on a bit, there's a lot more to it than that. Because if you are guided by these principles, that's actually the thing that will help you to respond to spirit influence, and you will deal with fear in the process.

You will automatically address fear if you have these principles.

Mary: If you just wander around saying, "I've got to deal with the fear, they're scaring me," and there is no compass or guide or things that you're remembering as morals and values inside of yourself, it's easy to get very lost, as many of you experience.

It's very important to understand that without some of these qualities, peace being one of them, truth and righteousness being two others, fear is probably never going to be addressed. You will be placed in fearful situations and you will cave. You will break your integrity in that place. We see that happening many times. I've seen people who are very passionate about the truths of Divine Love they've learned and receiving love from God and so forth, and also the other truths they've learned about God's Laws, but as soon as their fear is triggered that's it. They've never spoken or we've never heard from them again. And that's a lot about how much we are influenced by other people's attack of us. [00:38:12.06]

If we have a firm feeling about ourselves and a firm feeling about what is righteous and we have feet that are not willing to just run in any direction that a violent person is willing to push us, now we have some integrity. And when we have integrity we are able to combat almost any situation. Just by staying in integrity. So peace is just a wonderful quality to develop. The other thing important to understand about this is that peace can't come to a person who is terrified.

9.2.5. Acting in peace will expose fears

Mary: As you know, it's not very peaceful when you're terrified is it?

You are going to be agitated all the time until the terror is released from you. Until the fear is released from you, you will be agitated all the time. Many people expect that the way is to get away from their terror and, "Have some peace," as they call it.

Many times you hear, "I just wanted some kind of peace". And in most cases did they get peace? For the majority of the people; no. And the reason is that they have had to compromise in an attack in order to get peace. Whenever you compromise you're never going to get internal peace. Your conscience is going to nag at you and nag at you and nag at you and browbeat you until such time that you realise that you need to act differently. Instead of doing that, it is far better to confront the fear that acting in peace will always bring to you. And unless you're completely free of fear acting in peace will always bring you some fear to feel. [00:40:09.10]

Participant: I had a rare event just recently where I actually remembered a dream. And in the dream I was, all of a sudden, surrounded by very violent angry men. And as I looked into all of their eyes, they were in total fear. And I just woke up and I realised that violence is driven by their own fear.

Yes, violence is always driven by fear, yeah. And I feel it's very important to understand this linkage inside of ourselves, that when we accede to violence, when we compromise and allow violent situations to occur it is only because of fear, and violent situations only occur because the people who are so afraid to feel their own fear act violently instead.

You think of all the rage you've ever had. How much of it has come from a terror that you've also had? You just get terrified and all of a sudden you're in a rage. And if you are regularly in anger it is because you are basically terrified and you are not acknowledging it, and so we need to see this relationship between violence, fear and peace. Peace can never really occur on the Earth until there are people who are willing to have violence perpetrated towards themselves but continue to act peacefully. Once that happens, once we are willing to act peacefully even in the face of violence, now there's going to be change. [00:42:15.10]

I've seen many, many people change. My own friend Cornelius changed from this particular feeling, didn't you my friend? While he was hammering the nail into my wrists, the feeling of love that I had for him caused him to feel some of this peace and just changed his actions immediately. And this is the power that it has over every single violent situation. Isn't it remarkable how we think violence has the most power and yet peace is actually more powerful than violence?

10. Audience questions

10.1. Correcting situations where we've acted out of harmony with truth

Participant: While addressing things like staying in the truth over the last six months I've found myself in lots of situations like that. There have been times where I've had the qualities to address things that have happened but then there have been times where I haven't. And my question is, if you can see a way of correcting those things, would you always go back into that situation?

Yes.

Participant: And go, "Look I need to say some things here and I need to do this," if that's possible.

Always.

Participant: Yeah I felt that was the truth.

Mary and I have often had discussions about this, Josh, where Mary has felt like she has acted out of harmony with truth or love in a certain situation, mostly because of fear, and I've said, "Darling, just go back into it".

Mary: The best lesson that I have ever learned, I think, is that you know you can go back. You don't have to have it perfect every time. If you realise that you've made an error just do your best to correct it. And anyone who helped out in the Opening to God workshops saw me do it every single time. Usually by Sunday I'd be up in front of the group going, "Okay I'm sorry I've really skipped over this issue of love with all of you," and usually it was the most powerful thing that happened. Everyone kind of opened because I'd opened and not gone in the direction of fear but rather in the direction of peace. [00:45:21.03]

And also it's a mark of humility, Josh, for us to say, "Okay I made a mistake."

Participant: Well I've been learning about that.

Yeah. To go back in after you have made a mistake and fix it is a very powerful thing.

Mary: And if you think about it, that's the whole situation we have to address on the Earth right now, isn't it? In the environment.

Participant: Yeah, because there is this whole situation happening all the time called "the world". (Laughs)

Mary: Exactly, which is error, error, error.

It's okay to make mistakes, right? Hopefully of everything that I've taught you, you'll remember that.

Participant: I've just had this real hang up about mistakes.

Yeah, I agree.

Participant: And I've just been learning from making mistakes where I'm coming to grips with this truth that, "Wow, it's a good thing," because then you can just see the lineage, a little timeline and go, "Okay, I fell off there. Why?" And start asking questions around that.

Yeah. Mary and I try to identify together whenever something is happening. So life is going along and then all of a sudden we make a mistake and it sort of feels like things go downhill from there and something terrible happens. So then we try to go back to this point just before the mistake. What many of you are doing is judging yourself for the terrible thing that happened afterward; "Why did I do that again, isn't that terrible?" all those kind of things. It's better to forget about that, that's just the results of the mistake; they are the effects. The more you focus on the effects the less you're going to see the causes, aren't you? So if you just focus on the effects you are going to get yourself into a bit of a morose mess generally. It's far better to go back to the point of the mistake and then ask yourself, "Why did I make that mistake? What emotions were present at the mistake? And how can I fix that mistake?" and you will also gain a lot of self esteem doing that. [00:47:37.25]

A graph illustrating that rather than focusing on the negative effects of making a mistake, it is better to focus on why we made the mistake in the first place

Participant: Relating to that, see where you've drawn that little slip just before you make the mistake?

Yes, just when you think you're going well.

10.2. Self-punishment is an avoidance of feeling the pain created by the people who taught us to self-punish

Participant: Just when you think you're going well you make the mistake. Now because of this childhood that we've had we go into self-punishment...

Sorry I have to stop you there, Josh. You say it's because of the childhood experience you had that you go into self-punishment; it's not actually because of that. We go into self-punishment because we were taught to go into self-punishment and we prefer self-punishment to actually addressing the truth with the person who taught us to self-punish. I know that sounds a bit long-winded. [00:48:33.23]

Mary: There's a distinction.

But it's very important that you understand this distinction. We often blame ourselves because it's preferable; we have an emotional investment in blaming ourselves rather than actually placing the responsibility upon the person who did the damage. Many of us would prefer blaming ourselves to blaming our parent who created the damage; we'd prefer to do that. Not only did our parent do that and say that to us but now every single day so many of us are choosing to blame ourselves for something that we are not responsible for. We like blaming ourselves because when we blame ourselves we don't have to have the confrontation with the violent person who may treat us badly again. That's why we do it, so we have an emotional investment to run in a non-peaceful direction. [00:49:42.13]

I just needed to point that out. For people who attack themselves, it's not just about how you were trained to attack yourself, it's about your unwillingness to take personal responsibility for a decision that may result in more attack.

Does everyone get that? Many of you are self-attacking, and it's very important that you understand that your justification for attacking yourself is not that your mum and dad attacked you when you were young, but rather that if you placed the blame or the responsibility of the attack on the parent who actually did it they will probably attack you again. So you are just preventing further attack by blaming yourself. That's your motivation. That's the true motivation for blaming yourself. Does everyone understand that now? I think I've been about as clear as I can be. It's a difficult principle to get when you are used to attacking yourself. [00:51:03.07]

Participant: In other words it comes down to grieving the facts that this person did this to you?

Treated you badly.

Participant: Yep. And just feeling the grief and the truth of that.

Yep.

10.2.1. Self-punishment helps us avoid the fear of being attacked by others

Mary: And a lot of times there's a fear you have to confront in choosing, "I'm not going to self-attack anymore," because that means somebody else might attack me. So somebody else might start punishing me. We often choose to self-punish in order to avoid external punishment, and so when we choose not to self-punish anymore it can feel really scary because we're anticipating punishment from others externally.

From others, and from our environment.

Mary: And also there comes the confrontation of the truth that, "Wow other people did punish me and I chose this route in order to avoid their punishment," and that's grief.

So self-attack or self-punishment is an exercise in futility based around our own fear of addressing the issue with the person who originally harmed us. And we need to understand that because if we understand that we'll understand how we will use our feet to run to a situation. Blaming yourself and attacking yourself is an act of violence; it's just as bad as attacking somebody else. From God's perspective it's identical in nature. When you attack yourself you may as well have gone out and attacked somebody else because it's exactly the same from God's perspective with regard to acting out of harmony with love.

You think about it, we are all equal, are we not? If we have this sense of equality, if we are all equal, if I am a man and I want to attack a woman, then that is an act of violence towards her. If I attack myself it is an act of violence towards myself. From God's perspective they are identical. You and her are identical and the act is identical.

Attacking ourselves is just as harmful as attacking another, because we are all equal in God's eyes

Can you see why we need to give it up? We need to see the real reason why we do it, why we attack ourselves; because we are not prepared to see or place the responsibility for whatever happened on the person who did it. That's why we attack ourselves, why we aren't willing to place that responsibility, because we are afraid that they might do it again.

10.3. Taking action in harmony with truth and peace allows fear to be exposed and released

Participant: I guess the other part to the question was regarding going for the peaceful way and to stand up for peace requires us to...

Requires us to address our fear?

Participant: Yes, but it's also looking at continuously living the Way, and the issues that stop us from doing that are those initial emotions that began with Amon and Aman, where they were wanting to rebel against God. There's that emotion but there's also this other issue of being controlled all our lives by people. [00:55:17.25]

See, I don't agree that the issue of not following the Way has anything to do with any anger or any other thing towards God. I believe in our relationship with God we substitute anger or rage with God because God doesn't fight us back and God doesn't get violent with us. God's an easy person to be angry with, let's face it. You can be angry with God for the rest of your life and you will find it really easy. God's not going to punish you; God's not going to attack you again. God's not going to do anything violent towards you and that's why you want to be angry with God. The reason you want to be angry with God is that you want to avoid anger with the persons who actually did the damage who might be violent in return, that's the reason. Do you get that, Josh? It's not, we are angry with God because God did something wrong, but we are angry with God because we don't want to blame or make the person who actually did the wrong thing responsible. That's why we are angry with God. God's a scapegoat that we use to avoid the confrontation with the other person.

Participant: I don't know if I'm articulating what I'm meaning. In terms of living the Divine Love Path, having to have these qualities to continue to live this Way....

Or to develop the qualities as you live this Way, yes.

Participant: ...as you live this Way. So I guess what I was saying is we need to look at what causes us to not want to stand up for the peace.

You see I don't do that myself. I don't look at things before I've felt something. I think this is where a lot of people get confused about the path. I feel what you are expressing are a lot of what I feel are confusing things about the path, which you seem to believe but I don't actually believe.

For a start I don't believe that you can confront fear by sitting at home and feeling your fear. I don't believe you can do that. The only way I have ever confronted any fear is by acting, doing something that actually confronts the fear and then I've allowed myself to feel the fear in the situation and that has then cleared away the situation for me. [00:58:11.08]

Participant: I feel like that's the only time I've ever released fear as well.

Totally; that's the only time I believe anybody has.

Participant: I have had situations where I've been trying to release fear, but that doesn't work.

Give that up, yeah.

Mary: That's why the feet are so important. When you act to confront fear, when you act towards peace every emotion that is blocking you doing that is confronted.

Participant: It pops up.

Yeah, you can't avoid it. That's the beauty of it.

10.4. Correcting past mistakes (continued)

Participant: The thing that is driving my question really is consistency. I want to become consistent. I feel like I can live chunks of the path but then things happen where I don't respond with my loins girded! (Laughs)

Yeah, so things happen when you make a mistake. Okay, so what do you do when you make a mistake?

Participant: Well I think it's so bad and, "Oh I've done the worst thing," and I don't even realise it but next thing you know I'm frowning and I'm being all bad about myself.

Okay, so you punish yourself?

Participant: Yep

And I'm saying to you that you have an emotional reason for punishing yourself, and that is because you are afraid of actually putting the blame of the action on somebody else who is to blame.

Often we punish ourselves for making mistakes rather than addressing the cause of why we made the mistake

Mary: Or taking responsibility for the act. When we act unlovingly and we realise it and we just go straight into self-punishment, we are not taking any responsibility for what we've done.

Participant: We are not correcting it?

Mary: No.

Participant: We are not doing anything?

No, we are not doing anything. It's a great cop-out.

It's a great way to avoid the truth, it's a great way not to be righteous and it's a great way to have your feet running towards violence. We need to understand this; this is very important to get - that when we act, emotions will automatically be confronted. When we sit at home and try to feel our way through the emotions, well I don't know about you but I've never had an emotion come up that way, really. Have you? Haven't the emotions come through taking an action, some kind of resolve and then all of a sudden there is an emotion? Isn't that the way it mostly happens? And if you had a willingness to feel the emotion then you will feel it. If you didn't have a willingness you wouldn't, you'd ignore it and try to plough on. [01:00:42.08]

Mary: Have any of you guys seen that doco drama "Touching the Void" about the two guys in the mountains? A catastrophic thing has happened, and one of the men is facing a very bad situation. The chips are down, it's pretty bad and he realises, "I just have to keep making decisions. If I stop making decisions all is lost." And it's the same in life I feel. "I have to keep making decisions, be aware of the decisions I'm making and be humble in the process." That's the done deal. As soon as we stop, we start analysing and stop acting and stop making decisions, stop wanting to be conscious of our decisions, everything stagnates.

But also many of us rage at God about having to make a decision. (Laughs) But that's what free will is, isn't it? Free will is actually making a decision. Making a choice here and making another choice there, and that's what living your life is all about. Yet many of us get very upset because we are so worried about the mistake that might happen and we are actually living in fear of our mistakes. Instead of going, "No, actually I can correct pretty much every mistake, particularly the mistakes that are done unwittingly."

It's different trying to correct a mistake that was purposeful, that's pretty hard. If you purposefully want to yell and scream at somebody and you really feel justified doing it, it's pretty hard to go back to the person afterwards and tell them the truth about the situation and try to correct it. And they'd say, "Did you really want to do it," and you'd say, "Yes I did." How does one fix that situation? Not very easily. We would need to work our way through why we wanted to. The reality is that when we purposefully do things they are very hard to fix but if we unwittingly do things, things that are mistakes, most of them are actually pretty easy to fix. Most of them just require a little bit of humility. [01:03:10.05]

10.5. An example of a lady acting to stop processing spirits' emotions

Participant: I'm just a bit confused now because you're saying, "Take action, don't stay at home and feel your feelings." I'm feeling like I've actually made the step of coming out of the grief that I'm beset with all the time, which you told me was spirits' grief, and I need to get to the underlying fear, which came from my mother's anger towards me at a very young age. I feel that I have come to feel some of that terror and that absolutely really intense dread that comes with it; it's extremely intense and I've managed to find that and to start feeling it. And I feel that's a good way for me to go.

Mary: Can you see that you've taken an action?

Participant: I've just been processing at home and praying.

Mary: Yeah but what's the action that you took that triggered the emotion?

Participant: I prayed about feeling what was my own feeling and to have a desire to feel my own soul and all the emotions.

Mary: So what changed?

Participant: I've started to access that.

Mary: No, but there's an action you took beforehand that triggered the emotion. Beforehand you were totally entrenched with these spirits and then you said, "I'm not going to feel your grief anymore." I can guarantee you did that. [01:04:44.02]

Participant: Yeah.

Mary: That's an action. And that triggered the fear that you have about all their attack.

Participant: Okay, yes.

Mary: So you definitely took action. And when you take action and the emotion is upon you of course feel it, but you definitely acted.

Participant: Okay. Thank you.

The Law of Attraction will always bring you events too, when you go out into the world. You can't avoid them, that is the beauty of your soul and what it creates. If you go out into the world and engage the world, you'll find more and more that you will engage the things that cause you the distress that you need to feel. [01:05:23.16]

Participant: Sure, but I feel like I have such intense on-going, daily, hourly, from minute-to-minute pain that that's often enough.

I can't agree with that. I feel that you're placing a threshold on your pain, thinking that while you have your pain to a bearable controllable limit you are going to grow, but the reality is that you're only growing when the pain is worse than what you believe you can bear. [01:06:06.09]

Participant: It's already driving me absolutely crazy; it's just, like, shocking.

But I think myself and Mary have actually given you enough personal direction regarding what is the cause of your pain.

Participant: The terror of anger.

I don't believe that that is the cause of your pain, but I feel now that we are getting into a personal discussion about your emotions, which is not a loving thing to do for the rest of the audience.

10.6. Identifying the Law of Compensation vs. spirit attack

Participant: How do we know if we are under the Law of Compensation vs. spirit attack?

Spirit attack is part of our Law of Compensation for any emotion. You think about it; if you did not have that emotion inside of yourself then you would probably not be getting attacked. You are open to the attack because of the emotion.

Participant: I kind of meant like if we've done something and we're not sure if it was wrong or right?

Can I address the issue that many of you have? This is, you make a mistake and then you're very worried that you're going to be punished to bits for the mistake by the Law of Compensation. Like, do you believe God would make a law that punishes you when you're repentant? Do you believe that? Yes, you do, but I'm telling you it's not true! When you're truly repentant for an action there is no Law of Compensation because now you are engaging a higher law, the Law of Divine Love, the very thing that we've been learning about. So when we engage the Law of Divine Love through this action of repentance, why would you need to fear any compensation?

Participant: Because I get all these voices and then I get the flashback and it's like, "Oh shit, I'm in pain."

So what's the motive of all these voices?

Participant: To make me feel bad.

Of course. Which is what the armour of God was about, wasn't it?

The armour of God that protects us from negative spirit influence

Participant: My girder or my loins...

Your girder was down! (Laughs) Yes, that's exactly right! See, if we get told over and over again, "You're a bad person. You're a bad person. You're going to get punished for this," where is that coming from? It's not coming from God, so it's got to be coming from somebody else who's not anywhere near God's development. Because when we engage this Law of Repentance we are now engaging this higher Law of Love. God loves you and God loves to see you notice when you have done something wrong, feel about what you've done, not in a punishing way but feel about what you've done, particularly for the other person that you've done it towards, and to feel the emotion inside of you that caused you to do it. That's repentance. Now when we are in a state of repentance we have nothing to fear... as if we've got anything to fear from any of God's Laws! But there is certainly nothing to fear about the Law of Compensation. It's the Law of Compensation. So any attack I'm getting is not anything to do with the Law of Compensation if I'm repentant, it's to do with the underlying emotion of openness to other people attacking me and my willingness to accept it.

Now you and I have talked about this. The general principle of being open to the attack from other people is something that we definitely need to address. Can you see that if we've got our loins girded with truth, our breastplate of righteousness on, we are not going to allow self-attack and we are not going to allow other people to attack us, even when we've done something wrong? [01:11:13.24]

The reality is that when we do something wrong it does not mean that we deserve to be attacked. God does not attack you for doing things wrong, God never attacks you. Any person who attacks you when you do something wrong is already out of harmony with love themselves. And this is very important to understand; every single time somebody attacks me they are not being loving, no matter what I did.

Participant: Really?

Yeah. No matter what you did, they are not being loving. You might have hurt them in the past, or something like that, but they are not being loving in the moment of attack of you.

Participant: Neither are we on the flipside, hey?

Exactly! Every time I attack somebody else I am never being loving. It doesn't matter what justification I have. If I'm in a righteous rage and I think they deserve it none of that matters. If I am attacking them I am being unloving, it's as simple as that. If I write a nasty abusive email to them, I'm being unloving. If I get on the website forum and sit behind a false name and spew out all this garbage, I'm attacking and I'm being unloving. It doesn't matter what the person's done. If instead of that I'm willing to stand up for the truth, stand up for what is right and speak with love and care for the person then it's different, but many times we don't do that. [01:13:01.11]

10.7. Identifying whether our desire is our own or a spirit's

Participant: I've got part two of this question. This is with the gospel boots or the peace boots.

The gospel boots, yeah.

Participant: I get this thing sometimes when it feels like I'm in the garden getting the mulch and I just feel like there's fire pouring out of me, like lava or something. And I'm kind of confused whether that's my desire or I am being spirit-addicted. How do you know the difference between the two?

It is ethical for you to care for your garden?

Participant: I don't know. It feels pretty good.

What do you mean? I don't know.

Participant: I don't know what the word means very well.

It is ethical for you to care for the environment?

Participant: I guess so.

Of course it is. Why would you not know? Can you see for many of you, and particularly for you, Chris, and Josh is similar as well, you both get influenced by spirits so much that you even question whether something is right or not, and this is just your openness to being told, "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong," and your being willing to accept it. You see, if you have a firm sense of yourself you would say to yourself, "Well I've got a desire to help the environment." Planting plants is a great part of that, and you would go ahead and do it. And if you were in your passion doing it, and enjoying it, you wouldn't be going, "Maybe I'm being spirit-influenced," you'd be going, "This is fantastic I'm in a beautiful place here and I'm loving the plants." [01:14:28.18]

10.7.1. An example of a man being a secret gardener at night

Participant: What if you're doing it in secret, like somewhere where you are not meant to be doing it?

(Laughs) Then I would definitely address that ethical issue. This is where your desire has led you.

Mary: The secret night gardener.

(Laughter) It's a good question though! So this is where the guilt comes and then the spirits come before you know it...

Participant: So is it wrong or right to do that?

What do you think?

Participant: I don't know!

Let's say you had a back yard and you were planting it out yourself, and then some person come along in the middle of the night, like you're doing, and they start planting a heap of trees that you've never wanted and you didn't want in your garden. How would you feel? [01:15:10.13]

Participant: I'd be really happy.

You'd be really happy you reckon?

Participant: Yeah.

I doubt that, particularly if you had an interest in your own garden. I doubt you'd feel happy. You'd feel a bit annoyed. "What is that person doing there? I wanted to plant my gear there and I wanted to do this there." You'd have those kinds of feelings. So don't do that to other people.

If there's somebody you need to ask permission of, ask permission, then go ahead and do it if they say yes. If they say no, go and ask somebody else permission. I've got hundreds of trees at home; you could do it there! (Laugher)

Mary: You don't have to do it at night either. You can come during the day! (Laughs)

(Laughter) The key thing here is to recognise that that part of it is unethical. And once you address the unethical behaviour you might find you have a good relationship with whatever is happening. This is where, when you follow your desire and passion and you go and do something, you will generally find out whether something is unethical or not through an event that occurs that your soul attracts, and then you will be able to address it. You don't have to worry about it so much; you just need to address it when it comes up.

10.7.2. Taking personal responsibility for our lives

You get very afraid because in the past you have been punished a lot for things that you thought were okay to do but they turned out that other people thought that they were wrong, and then you got punished. So you want to ask other people all the time, "What's right?" and, "What's wrong?" There's your lack of self-responsibility. You want to ask other people what is right and wrong so you can avoid the fear of doing something wrong and then getting punished for it. [01:16:57.09]

Participant: So I'm better off doing things wrong.

You are better off doing things wrong.

Participant: And learning from it.

And if you get punished for them, feel that. If you realise that you are out of harmony with love when you did it, feel that. Look through it and sincerely address those issues. It's far better to do that than to keep on asking people all the time, "What's right, what's right, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's right, what's wrong?" [01:17:19.02]

Participant: It's so boring all the time.

Exactly! But it also places the responsibility on the other person for the decisions of your own life and that is wrong; that is not ethical to do. I don't want to be responsible for your life and I don't want you to be responsible for mine. [01:17:38.08]

So more and more I'm resisting people asking me personal questions about their life because I feel they have the responsibility to ask and answer their own questions about their life. I'm happy to provide assistance about God's Laws and Principles, like we've been doing today. But I'm not happy to continually answer people's personal questions about their life when it's quite obvious to me, and it should be quite obvious to them, that they are trying to place the responsibility onto me for the decisions they are making. If I did that you would be in a cult. Can you see that? If I took responsibility and told you what I feel you should do with your life, which is not my right, you would be in a cult. That's why I definitely do not want to do that and in fact it's not right for me to do that. All I can do is tell you the principles that I've discovered in my own relationship with God, to give them to you and then it's up to you what you do with your life. You also need to remember that in your relationships with others. Stop asking them what they believe and start feeling about what you believe. And then act upon that and God will show you through this relationship whether you were wrong and made a mistake or not. That's a beautiful thing. [01:19:02.19]

10.8. Determining whether a desire is ethical

Participant: I just have a little question based on what Chris was asking. When you have a desire do you just ask yourself, "Is this ethical, do I want to do it, do I feel like I really want to do this?" and then just go for it?

Yeah. Ask yourself, "Is this ethical?" And what we mean by that is, "Would I like somebody else doing that to me or not?" Or, "Do I believe this is an ethical thing to do?" Once the answer to that is yes, if I still have the desire why would I not do it?

Participant: For me I just get really intellectual and I try and analyse where it comes from.

Yeah. Who cares where any desire comes from? Honestly. It might be the suggestion of a spirit who's nice or it might be the suggestion of a spirit who is nasty, it doesn't really matter. If you've asked yourself the ethical question and you're trying to protect yourself constantly with the truth that in God's eyes you're worth loving, you're equal to everyone else, and you're protecting yourself with that truth, then it's going to be very hard for you to make a wrong choice with a desire. Many people over-analyse. Do you know why we over-analyse? [01:20:18.24]

Mary: Because we don't want to make decisions.

Because we're afraid. That's why we over-analyse. The reality is that it's very simple to live your life in harmony with God's Truth. You need to just ask yourself the ethical questions, ask yourself what you know or believe the truth to be at that moment in time. You need to have your feet running in that direction and once that happens things will be shown to you. God will explain them to you and the only reason many of you still want to ask me personal questions about your life is that you do not want to make the mistakes yourself, and the only reason you don't want to make the mistakes yourself is that you obviously have some history of feeling afraid about making mistakes. I'm perfectly happy to make my own mistakes and I'm perfectly happy to let you make yours! (Laughs) In fact I'd prefer that, rather than you asking me a question and my giving you the answer. Now I'm to blame for your action. And that's very dangerous and damaging.

10.9. Determining what is real

Participant: I've got a question from earlier on and I'm now confronting my fear of speaking in front of all these people.

Awesome.

Participant: I was just wondering out of those 22 billion spirits that are amongst us and Earth-bound, you said one third of them don't know. How do I know that I'm not a spirit here?

No, these spirits do not have a physical body.

Participant: But how do I know I've got a physical body?

Because I can see it right now, and so even though you might not know, there are about 150 people in here that do.

Participant: I might be imagining that.

See, now you are getting very philosophical and there's not much that I can do with that.

Participant: Oh, okay. It's just a question I had.

Well I feel that we either face reality, or we don't. We can get very philosophical about reality and then go into this philosophical discussion. Philosophical discussions generally do not make us happier nor do they help us resolve any issues in our life. I feel that what they actually do is help us to avoid the issues in our life rather than resolve them. Sure, the question that I would ask myself is, "Whether I am here or not I am conscious that I am here. I feel an interaction with at least 150 or so people in this audience and I can actually see them and touch them and hug them and discuss things with them." We can have an exchange. Whether it's real or not is really immaterial to me. "Am I happy or not?" And that's the real question I feel I need to ask myself. If I'm not happy then what do I do to change that? Philosophical discussions do not create happiness. In fact in most cases that I've found, they actually destroy happiness and cause us to go into states that never resolve any question, and I believe that every question is resolvable but we have to become real about it. [01:23:41.06]

Mary: Can I add to that? I understand that when we hear about all these other truths about things that are not commonly seen, and the spirit world, and the true nature of ourselves, and having a spirit body, sometimes I know in the beginning it feels like reality is being bent out of shape and I have to question a lot of things that I took for granted, or that I never thought about. But something that I believe is that God's Universe is designed to bring us truth in every way. If we desire it He will find us a way to show us what the truth is, as long as that desire is sincere. So with any question that I have now, I decide, "Well if I really want to know this God is going to give me evidence of what the truth is." And so if I really have that question I would be sincere about it and perhaps use the hypothesis, "God would want me to know the truth about that," and see what happens. And I think that goes for a lot of spirits who are listening here because I feel there are spirits who are really in a quandary about that. [01:24:53.23]

Some of them don't even know if they are real or not.

Mary: Yeah, but the truth is that God is trying to show them the truth about that pretty constantly. It's just that at the moment they are preferring some denial.

Participant: I was just wondering whether I'm in denial, that's all.

No, I think you're a real person. I can see you but it's up to you and what you believe you see. You see that is just what I was saying to Chris; in the end we can't make other people responsible for what we believe. We need to work our way through these issues and these questions that we have. So my suggestion is to just go with that belief until you're shown differently. Always go with what you believe the truth to be until some evidence points you in a different direction.

Mary: But be open to the evidence though. That's the key, isn't it?

When we are open like that you can see that we won't have fixed opinions until we've the personal experience. The beauty of that is that we are always open to more truth until the personal experience is given to us.

11. Closing Words

Anyway guys, it must be time to finish. It's been going a long time. We've got three more parts of the armour of God to deal with; we've got the 'shield of faith,' the 'helmet of salvation,' and the 'sword of the spirit' to deal with, so we will do that discussion with you tomorrow in Session Two of "Positively Responding to Spirit Influence." You're welcome to come along if you want to. Thanks, guys. Thank you. (Applause)

