

### The Human Soul:

### Addictions & Bribery, Fear, Threats & Blackmail

### By

### Jesus (AJ Miller)

Published by

Divine Truth, Australia at Smashwords

http://www.divinetruth.com/

Copyright 2015 Divine Truth

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### This ebook is a transcript of a seminar delivered on 19th March 2011 in Murgon, Australia by Jesus (AJ Miller) as part of The Human Soul series. In this seminar Jesus describes how emotional addictions affect our lives and our relationship with God, how to identify our addictions, and how spirit interactions occur through addictions.

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### Table of Contents

Addictions and Bribery, Fear, Threats and Blackmail: Part 1

1. Introduction

2. Anger, addictions and fear cover our true self

3. Layers around our true self prevent our relationship with God

3.1. An illustration of how little time we spend in our true self connecting to God

3.2. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love

3.3. Prayer and the layers in our soul

3.4. An example of Christians receiving Divine Love

3.5. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love (continued)

3.6. Feeling a lack of desire after hearing Divine Truth

3.6.1. An example of AJ previously eating ice cream

3.7. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love (continued)

3.7.1. Coming to see ourselves as God sees us

3.8. Spirits influence us through our fear, addictions and anger

4. Audience questions

4.1. Divine Love is the only substance that flows from God that transforms the soul

4.2. Spirits can influence us positively as well as negatively

4.2.1. An example of spirits connecting to people drinking alcohol on Earth

4.3. Self punishment is an addiction which is worsened by evil spirits

4.4. Gaining faith by receiving Divine Love

4.5. All addictions are harmful

4.6. Spirits use us to satisfy their addictions

4.7. Praying for help in dealing with anger and addictions

4.8. We need a desire for God to deal with every addiction and fear

4.9. Gaining faith that God is good and God loves us

4.10. Dealing with disillusionment about failing to find truth in the past

4.11. Connecting to God while taking responsibility for our lives

4.12. Both removing addictions and developing desire are required to connect to God

4.12.1. An example of acting in fear vs. desire in preparation for Earth changes

4.13. Baptism is not an effective way of removing unlovingness from ourselves

4.14. Developing a desire for God

4.15. Following loving desires leads us to God

5. How addictions affect our lives emotionally

5.1. Expectations and demands result from our addictions

5.1.1. An example of blaming the government for natural disasters

5.2. Our addictions make our happiness dependent upon our environment

5.3. Our addictions prevent us from connecting to God

5.4. Fatalism is a way to avoid our emotions

6. Others manipulate our addictions through bribery, threats and blackmail

6.1. An example of a participant wanting her ex-partner to still be in love with her

6.2. An example of spirits bribing people with money

6.3. An example of controlling family members using threats

7. How addictions affect our lives emotionally (continued)

7.1. Anger towards God and others indicates addictive demands

7.2. Identifying and working through our addictions

7.3. Anger is never righteous

7.3.1. An example of Christians believing they're doing God's Will

7.3.2. An example of people rebelling against being told they're not capable of success

7.3.3. An example of AJ not responding to attacks on the Internet

7.3.4. An example of people rebelling against being told they're not capable of success (continued)

7.3.5. An example of using righteous anger to justify violence

7.4. All addictions are unloving

### Addictions and Bribery, Fear, Threats and Blackmail: Part 2

8. Mary's personal experiences of working through addictions

8.1. Addictions can make us feel good despite our causal pain

8.1.1. An example of addictions of pleasing others

8.2. Addictive happiness is shallow and keeps us away from joy and God

9. How to identify when we're in addiction

9.1. We first resort to bribery when our addictions are not met

9.1.1. An example of not being truthful about being bored in an interaction

9.2. We secondly resort to threats when our addictions are not met

9.2.1. An example of threatening to leave a relationship

9.2.2. An example of Mary's previous relationship

9.3. We thirdly resort to blackmail when our addictions are not

10. Audience questions

10.1. It is possible to falsely perceive that others are using bribery, threats and blackmail

10.1.1. Focusing on our own emotions when falsely accused

10.2. Becoming aware of control and addictions in society

10.2.1. Our addictions prevent us from being sensitive to others' emotions

10.3. Giving up addictions and getting into fear and grief

10.3.1. With God's help it's possible to release addictions in very short periods of time

10.3.2. Separating our emotions about our parents from our beliefs about God

10.4. We need to release emotions to view our parents and God differently

10.5. Difficulties in romantic relationships stem from parent-based injuries

10.5.1. Friendships are often based around addictions

10.5.2. Addictions relationships create intense attraction followed by lessened attraction

10.6. Emotional injuries towards men are imparted from both parents

10.7. Focusing on unloving emotions rather than causal emotions

11. Spirit interactions with addictions

11.1. Our expectations and demands constantly emanate from us into the universe

11.2. Spirits hook into co-dependent addictions with us

11.3. Spirits use bribery, threats and blackmail to maintain addictive relationships with us

11.3.1. An example of Mary's co-dependent addiction with male spirits

11.3.2. An example of spirits encouraging people on Earth to rape and murder

11.3.3. An example of being open to hearing truth

11.3.4. Breaking the addiction with spirits by feeling our true self

11.3.5. An example of mishearing what AJ says

11.4. Seeking truth is the way to discover our addictions with spirits

11.4.1. Identifying what feelings we give to spirits

12. AJ addresses the audience response to the subject matter

12.1. The power of waking up to our addictions

12.2. Addictions with others drain our energy

13. Closing Words

Addictions and Bribery, Fear, Threats and Blackmail: Part 1

1. Introduction

Welcome along. I'm Jesus, and this is Mary. I've been doing this travelling around teaching now for nearly six years. Mary's been joining me for the last two or so.

The subject today that I wanted to talk about is a part of the human soul series of talks and this discussion is something that I feel has been happening for many of you for the last six months, and so I want to talk about that. It begins with the addictions, and we've talked a little before about addictions, and bribery and fear, threats and blackmail. That's a long winded topic, isn't it? Addictions and bribery, fear, threats and blackmail.

One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this subject is I can feel that many of you are still in the addictions with regard to your development towards God. And what I wanted to do today is firstly explain to you how addictions interfere with your relationship with God. And then after we've talked about that, we'll talk about these other aspects of bribery, threats and blackmail; how we emotionally engage these things constantly. What we often do before we realise it, we're bribing someone emotionally or we're even threatening them emotionally, or we can even get to the stage where we're blackmailing them emotionally just to get our addictions met. And so what we want to do today is talk about how our addictions actually pull into us all of this very unloving behaviour and remember every time we engage in unloving behaviour we're affecting our soul. Our soul condition is degrading, becoming darker. And it's the addictions actually too that many times prevent our relationship with God. So what I want to do first is just remind you of how the relationship with God is established and it's the same kind of material we've looked at before. [00:06:52.10]

2. Anger, addictions and fear cover our true self

So we start with God and here's our soul, and this time instead of drawing the half soul as I normally would, either the male half or the female half, let's just draw my soul, my true self as a circle.

Our soul is our true self that connects to God

Now my true self isn't the person that I want to look like to everyone else. It isn't the person that I want everybody else to perceive me to be. It's actually the person that God sees. That's our true self. But then wrapped around our true self there are layers of wrapping. You often refer to them as like onion layers that you're digging down through emotionally.

You could say our true self is full of what you would call causal emotions or emotions that are the real emotions that prevent our relationship with God. They're there in that true self. So the first layer above our true self, and around our true self there is a layer generally of fear. So the fear is blocking us from accessing our true self. The fears might be, I'm afraid that you might see me as a terribly bad person, and so what I do when I'm with you is I put on a front so that you see a different person than what I perceive myself to be or of what I really am. Now that's my fear that I'm not allowing myself to feel. That fear is dictating that action and I'm afraid of you seeing me as I truly am so I now put on a front and the fear is the thing that allows me to put on that front.

Usually these fears were all created of course during our childhood and our environment creates them, and so what happens our fears then dictate the next layer of what happens in our life. And the next layer of what happens in our life is our addictions. So if I'm afraid of you seeing me as I truly am, I then set up a system that I create, and I create through this system an addiction. I'm addicted to you seeing me differently to what I truly am. I want you to see something different than what I see because I'm so terrified about what I see inside of myself and I don't want to feel that. And so what I do instead of doing that is I want you to see something completely different to what I feel myself to be and so I set up these addictive interactions with people around me. And so I want them to placate that fear that I have, the fear of my true self, the fear of seeing myself as I truly am. And those addictions go into play.

Then, when my addictions are not met, I do another thing. What is that? Anger. I start getting angry with my environment somehow and when I say with my environment, it is usually the people in my environment that I get the most angry with. But sometimes it's with the environment itself. Like, a mozzie comes along, bites you on the arm, you're angry with the environment. The mozzie never met your addiction. He shouldn't attack you. Bang! [00:11:21.04]

Layers of anger, addictions and fear surround our true self

That's a simple action that's taken out of anger, of attack, something that didn't meet your addictions. And it plays right across from very simple areas of our life right through to very complicated areas of our life, which we'll talk about it as we go on.

3. Layers around our true self prevent our relationship with God

Now in amongst all of this, God is wanting to have a relationship with us. But can you see the problem? There's not just our true self but now there's all this stuff now within us. God is trying to connect to us via this connection called the Holy Spirit, which is like a conduit, via which God can pump us full of God's Love if we have a longing for that love. So we're there longing for this love, or thinking we are, but we've got all these fears, addictions and anger all in place around our true self. Now God's wanting to connect to our true self; in fact the only way God can connect is to our true self. It's the only way God can connect. So this Holy Spirit, which is available everywhere in the universe to any person who has a longing for God, cannot connect with us. And remember the Holy Spirit is also a spirit of truth. So in other words unless we are in our true self nothing can flow. Nothing can get in. [00:13:12.13]

And so what's happening is God's Holy Spirit's there, waiting for a connection, it's waiting for us to deal with our fears, deal with our addiction, deal with our anger. Now God's got a lot of other things in play to help us with those three things, and we'll talk about that as we go on. But for the moment the main thing to understand is that God's Love cannot flow into a soul unless the soul itself is in a position of truth, and remember in a course of a day this position may waver. So you might have ten minutes of the day where you're in your true self. Now in that ten minutes, God can connect with you. But if the rest of the day you're in addictions, then God can't connect to you there. And this is why we only receive dribs and drabs of Divine Love. And this is also why many people who have been in Christian religions who have received some Divine Love get to a certain point where they can't receive any more. And the reason why they can't is because these fears, addictions and anger, that is all layering around the true self, are not being dealt with. And unless they're dealt with, that Holy Spirit connection cannot be made and the Divine Love, which is a thing that flows through the Holy Spirit to the person, cannot flow.

The Holy Spirit can only deliver God's Love to us when we are in our true self

3.1. An illustration of how little time we spend in our true self connecting to God

Can you see how important it is to your relationship with God that fear, addictions and anger are dealt with? Without you dealing with those things, what happens is that the connection with God cannot be maintained and usually what we find happening in the course of a practical day is we might have a little bit of time in the morning where we get a bit of time for ourselves and we pray a bit for ten minutes, fifteen minutes and in that time we might be connected to our true self and so we receive some Divine Love. And then what happens after that? After that what happens is we get out of our true self, into some fears, the day kicks in, we have to have the coffee to start the day because now we're a bit worried about the day and the day kicks in. And as the day kicks in and goes progressively further through the day, we've got all of these pressures, responsibilities, day-to-day life now affecting our longing for God and a lot of the times we don't realise but a lot of the times we are in our addictions with almost every interaction that happens during the day. Now in that space our true self is now buried under these addictions and fears and as a result of that our true self isn't being expressed and we cannot receive God's Love during that time.

And then sometimes by the end of the day we're quite tired, sometimes quite emotional by the end of the day, we sit down to have a rest and now we're starting to get back in touch with ourselves. This is what normally happens for us. We start getting in touch with ourselves to a degree and as that happens we start to reconnect with our true self, the real person we are and we feel, "Oh that was an overwhelming day", and you feel a bit emotional about that perhaps or a bit sad about it, maybe even might cry about it or it might be other things occurring as well and as a result of that, you're now getting back in touch with your true self and some more Divine Love can flow in that day.

Now if you look at your 24 hours, how many minutes is that? 1440. That's how many minutes there are in a day. And how many of those minutes did I say we were connecting with God? Ten, maybe 20. So how's that as a ratio? 20 out of 1440. That's not very much when you look at it in terms of the slice.

We often can spend as little as 20 minutes out of 1440 minutes in a day connecting to God

Now you know what we often do with that? We often go, ten years later, we go, "God, I've been searching for you for ten years!" No, you've been searching for God 20 minutes of the day for 10 years. Basically that's what's been happening. So we need to address that. So this is what's going on with us most of our lives. So we want to stop this process. We want to get to a place where we're in our true self most of the time. And to do that, we're going to have to understand some things about ourselves. We're going to have to understand our fears. We need to understand our addictions. And we need to understand the reasons for our anger. And if we can start getting into those things, then some Divine Love will flow.

3.2. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love

Now there are a lot of people who talk about God's Love and they say, "No, none of what AJ's saying there is true. God's Love automatically deals with all of those things." And I want to tell you that that's not true. It's not true that God's Love automatically deals with those things. In fact a hundred years or so ago, when we channelled to James Padgett, I actually wrote a message to James Padgett about this. And I'd just like to read it to you. This is what is says.

"I am here, Jesus. I desire to write tonight on the subject of how the redeemed soul is saved from the penalties, which sin and error has brought upon it. When the soul is in a condition of sin and error..."

In other words when the soul has all of these things going on inside of its causal true self, and all of these different things that motivate its actions out of harmony with love. Remember all sin is, is disharmony with love. That's all sin is. So when we talk about sin, we're talking about the disharmony with love in our soul.

"When the soul is in a condition of disharmony with love, it is not responsive to the inflowing of the Holy Spirit and in order to get into condition of receptivity to these influence, it must have an awakening as to its actual condition of enslavement by these things."

In other words, while we have all of these things in play, we are not open to the reception of Divine Love through the Holy Spirit. We're not open to the connection. If we're not open to the connection, we've got to have some other kind of awakening to get us open to the connection. The Divine Love itself doesn't open our connection. We have to be open first before the Divine Love can flow into our soul. I said,

"Until such an awakening comes to it, there is no possibility of it receiving the Love of God into it. And in turning it's thoughts to the truths of God and to the practices of life that will help it in its progress toward the condition of freedom."

So while I am blind to what fears I have, to what addictions I have and to the anger that I have buried inside me, while I am blind to all that, I am in a condition of unreceptivity. I am in a condition of resistance to God. While I'm in that state, all blocked up, the Divine Love cannot flow into my soul. It's only those moments in time when I'm unblocking and seeing something; that's the moment in time. [00:21:42.18]

3.3. Prayer and the layers in our soul

Participant: AJ, how does that relate to prayer as one of the most important ways to connect to God? And also how does what you're explaining relate to the orthodox Christian view of creating a connection to God?

Well firstly let's address prayer. What is prayer? Prayer is the sincere and pure longings of the soul, the true self, towards God. Now, can you say that you have sincere longings when you've got a heap of fear, a heap of addiction in play and a lot of anger inside? Now obviously there's less effectiveness there. If we start addressing the fears, addictions and anger we can have some pure longings, and remember prayer is the pure longing of the soul. It's not the soul going, "Oh, I think I'll have a pray with God. I'll just sit down for ten minutes and I'll ask to God, give me this or give me that or do this for me or do that for me," without me facing myself. God requires that you face yourself in the process. And that's what prayer is in the end. Prayer is the longings of your soul in its pure state, and that only happens for most of us a few minutes of the day.

To be honest, how many of you feel Divine Love flowing every minute of the day? It's very rare, isn't it? And in fact to get to that point you have to be actually at-one with God. That's the time when you're at-one with God; you will actually have Divine Love flowing every minute of the day. And what I'm trying to explain to you today is what's blocking that love from flowing every minute of the day. And it's these things - the fear, addictions and anger. It's the lack of the awakening that I mentioned in the Padgett messages. When I said,

"Until such awakening comes to it, there is no possibility of receiving Divine Love".

So you can pray all you like in terms of the physical act of talking to God, but the prayer is not going to reach any further than your brain and the waves that come out of it because it can't unless it's pure. God connects with the pure soul, and often the words that we use are the "repentant soul" and all of those other kinds of terms. That's the connection that God maintains. Now can remember the second question for me? [00:24:08.26]

3.4. An example of Christians receiving Divine Love

Participant: The second question was well how does that relate to orthodox Christianity and then people going along to church and believing that they're in the zone and they're praying and connecting. I mean, are they?

Well, obviously there are times. How many of you have been along recently to some Pentecostal church or something like that? Just a few. It's interesting when you go along because there are times when you see God's Love is flowing into the individuals present and that's the times usually when their emotions are free and open and they have a deep longing. Most of the time it's happening when they're singing or some kind of thing like that is going on and they're feeling really emotional towards God, feeling a lot of desire and love for God, and in that moment Divine Love flows into their soul. So in that moment Divine Love flows. But in most other moments of their life they're not in that state and therefore Divine Love cannot flow in any other state than that state. And what I'm saying to you today is these are the reasons why Divine Love doesn't flow all the time to most people. It's because they're unwilling to have the awakening as to the perception of their true self, of their true nature, what's really going on inside of them. They're unwilling to actually awaken to what the error is present inside of them. [00:25:36.03]

3.5. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love (continued)

If I can continue reading this because I said,

"I would not have mankind believe that any soul is compelled to stay in this condition of slavery to sin until the Holy Spirit comes to it with the Father's Love to bestow it in all abundance. For the mission of the Holy Spirit is not to awaken man's soul to a realisation of sin and death."

So the mission of the Holy Spirit is not to awaken man's soul, but merely to bring the Divine Love to the soul when the soul is ready to receive it. That's the mission of the Holy Spirit.

The soul has to be gotten by us, through our free will, into a state where we can receive Divine Love. When we're in a state where we can receive it, the Holy Spirit makes a connection to our soul. Once it makes a connection to our soul what happens? Now the connection is made, the conduit is established, the Divine Love flows into our soul. That's what happens. In other words the awakening to these things, the sin and error that exists within the soul,

"The awakening must come from other causes that influence the mind as well as the soul and cause them to realise that the life man lives is not the correct life for the one in accord with the demands of the Law of God or with the real longings of their own hearts and souls."

Let me illustrate. Today, or last week, how many of you actually did what you really wanted to do. Really wanted to do. The whole week? A few. Now, can you see straight away that most of us are ready to do things we don't want to do? Why is that? The reason why is because we have addictions. We believe, we have belief systems in play, and they're all false beliefs by the way, that tell us, "I've got to work 40 hours otherwise (what's the fear?) I won't have enough money to pay my mortgage."

And I'm driving along to work, and each kilometre I drive my heart sinks a bit. For many of us that's the way it is when we drive to work because we don't really want to go to that job. So what are we doing by going to that job? We are further and further detuning from our true self. And by the time we got to the work, we are now totally out of harmony with our true self because what does our true self want to do? It's screaming at us, saying, "I don't want to be here anymore! I don't want to be here anymore! I want to go and do something else!" That's what it's saying. But we are too afraid or we're too much in our addictions to go and embrace a life that we're passionate about and so a result we stay doing the fear-based thing out of an addiction. And as we stay doing the fear-based thing out of the addiction, can God connect to us in that place? No, not anymore. [00:29:11.14]

3.6. Feeling a lack of desire after hearing Divine Truth

Participant: I used to really want to do a lot of things and now I find that I don't have the desire and I don't know why that happened.

Yep. A lot of times what happens when we first start hearing the Divine Truth, we go through this really strange stage, and our fears kick in because we're so afraid of disappointing God in some way that we don't do anything at all. We're like a person who is just so afraid to actually go out and do what we desire, we're so worried that our desires might be out of harmony with truth or out of harmony with love, that we actually decide, "Oh, I'm not going to do that and I won't do that because that's got this in it." Instead of just doing it still and actually bringing our desires into harmony with the love, we have a tendency then to avoid the process of acting. And that is what suppresses those desires that we used to have.

3.6.1. An example of AJ previously eating ice cream

Also, at the same time what is going on is we start recognising, "Oh, I used to really like doing that"; for example I used to really like eating lots of ice cream. I'd get a four litre tub of ice cream, cut it into fours with a knife, bring out one litre on the plate, and pour topping over it. That was my dinner. I believed in having ice cream before dinner. Well if you think about it, it makes sense; you've got the most room for the thing you like the most.

So I was in this place where I was just enjoying eating my ice cream, and then, as you progress you go, "I wonder how they produce this ice cream?" and you go through all of that. You have a look at the Internet, you investigate all of those things and you discover, "Wow, they kill all these calves and they all go off to slaughter and this all happens and that all happens, and then they feed these cows this thing and a lot of them are kept in these little booths," and by now my conscience is now starting to bother me about this ice cream. So now I'm not feeling good about eating my ice cream that I used to enjoy. But I still want to have it because it tastes nice and everything else is still going on.

So I'm going through this phase where I'm thinking things like, "What do I do? What do I do with that particular thing or that particular thing?" And so a lot of times I'll start getting myself really mixed up with my desires and passions. The key is to not do that. The key is to go ahead with your desires and passions but keep them in harmony with love, or bring them into harmony with love. And in fact if you allow God to help you with this process, which we'll talk about in a minute how that happens, your fears and addictions will all get dealt with and your life will automatically come in harmony with love, but you'll be passionate doing things. [00:32:06.15]

So if you're finding right now that you're quite down, depressed and not really getting much accomplished, that's because you're afraid to act. And that's a fear. That's not a thing to do with your true self. So my suggestion, Karen, is there are two things happening. One, that I'm first in the state where I'm afraid to act because I'm afraid that one of the things I act in might actually be in disharmony with one of God's Laws, and I'm afraid of somehow getting punished. And I need to deal with that fear because God's not a punishing God. I just need to feel the results of every action that I take. Secondly, sometimes at the beginning my conscience bothers me and so then I stop doing the things that I used to desire but I don't replace those desires or merge those desires into love. And we need to do both of those things.

3.7. A Padgett message from Jesus about receiving Divine Love (continued)

I'll just keep reading this. It says,

"Until this awakening comes, the soul is really dead so far as to having a consciousness of the existence of the truths or of its redemption is concerned. And such death means continuance of the thoughts of evil and sin,"

which are all related to our fears and our addictions and our anger and rage,

"in the life, which leads only to condemnation and death for long, long years it might be."

So what often happens is because we have these things in play, and we're wanting to maintain a sense of blindness to them, what we finish up doing is we allow years to go past. And years and years go past and we really make very little progress in love.

One of the questions I was going to ask you earlier was how many of you feel you've progressed in the demonstration of your love in the last 6 months? So how many feel that? So quite a number. That's really lovely. Some of you haven't actually progressed - in fact some of you have regressed in the demonstration of your love in the last 6 months, and you can feel that too. You feel that in your soul.

3.7.1. Coming to see ourselves as God sees us

The only reason why we can make progress is because we start addressing the awakening of our soul, seeing ourselves as we truly are. In fact in the end remember we've talked in the past about other things but one of the things is seeing ourselves as God sees us - warts and all. That's what we need to see. And of course God looks down and sees us, warts and all, and still loves us, and knows the pure part of our soul that's in there. So God still feels that for us. But God also sees the fear that you have and God sees the addictions that you have and God sees how you were unloving here and how you were unloving there and what you did last week that was unloving to your partner or your neighbour or your child. God sees all those things too. [00:35:08.27]

And what we need to do is come to see the same things because if we saw them we probably wouldn't do them anymore. That's why we need to see them. And unless we see them we will not have the awakening we need to have.

"But come nearer to the point of my discourse,"

I said, a hundred years ago,

"The soul that is existing in sin and error will have, sooner or later, to pay the penalties for such sin and error. And there is no escape from the payment of these penalties except in the redemption that the Father provided by the new birth."

So in other words, I can stay in sin and error, in the addictions, the anger, the rage, and the fear and not deal with any of those for as long as I desire. God has given me the free will to make that choice. God has allowed me to choose to remain in that place for as long as I want. However there are penalties associated with staying in those places because every one of these things creates actions and creates words and deeds that actually damage your environment and damage yourself. So at the end of the day, we just get darker if we do that. We don't want to do that if we really want to get closer to God.

"These penalties are only the natural results of the operation of God's Law and they must be endured until the full penalty is paid. Even though a man may progress to a higher condition of soul excellence and have such happiness, yet he must pay the last farthing and thus release himself from these penalties."

So in other words these penalties which are not just the results of our own "sin" or "missing the mark with regard to love", but they are also the result of the "sins" or "the missing of the mark of love of our environment".

We grew up in an environment that is already unloving for most of us. Look at our day-to-day actions as a collective human race. Right now, in Japan, they've got the issues with the nuclear reactors. Well, who ever thought of building a nuclear reactor in the first place? Does that seem to be a loving thing that something could go wrong and actually cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people? Can you see the creation of those things was born from an unloving decision in the first place and in the end from a fear? And we're now dealing with the consequences of that fear being expressed and turned into actions. [00:37:44.26]

And the Japanese people in particular have had a history of the consequences of that in their lives, and yet as a world, we do not learn. Why? Because we want to remain blind to ourselves. We don't want to have the awakening we need to have to make the changes that need to occur.

3.8. Spirits influence us through our fear, addictions and anger

Now I'd just like to read you one line of the prayer for Divine Love that's mentioned in the Padgett messages because this is the part of the topic today. It says,

"Keep us in the shadow of your love every hour and moment of our lives and help us to overcome all temptations of the flesh and the influence of the powers of the evil ones who so constantly surround us."

So there are two issues there. There are the temptations of the flesh, and then there is the influence of people around us who influence us into following the temptations of the flesh.

I know that sounds all very Christian, but if you think about your practical day-to-day life, there are many times where you're tempted away from love, where you're tempted to be angry or to get into a rage with someone. Automatically in that place we are surrounded by spirits as well in the same condition, who want to help you do that action. They are ones who want to make your life worse. They want to enjoy seeing your degradation, and so they help you go and do that.

How can they do that? They can only do that because we have fears and addictions and anger in play; because if we were willing to feel those feelings without acting upon them, they would never be able to influence us. No one in your life, no one in this world can ever influence you as long as you are willing to stay feeling your feelings and have every feeling in harmony with love. Not a single person can influence you out of love when you stay in that place. So if we are receiving influence from our external environment, whether it be spirits or people on Earth, it's because we have our fears and addictions in play, and we don't want to face those fears and addictions. [00:40:18.06]

So can everyone see how important it is to have this discussion? So it's really important to start facing some of this stuff.

4. Audience questions

4.1. Divine Love is the only substance that flows from God that transforms the soul

Participant: I'm wondering if any other substance besides Divine Love flows from God?

Yes there are lots of other substances that flow from God but the Divine Love is the only substance that flows through the Holy Spirit that is designed as a connection to the human soul. But there are lots of other substances. In fact all of our actual life force is a force that flows through the universe from God as well. It's a totally different substance and yet it flows constantly from God. Now most of us are open to accepting that and so we stay alive and life continues, and in fact the entire universe is pregnant with life as a result of that particular substance. But that's not the substance that's going to transform your soul. The substance that will transform your soul is Divine Love and that flows through the only connection it can flow through, which is the Holy Spirit. [00:41:37.25]

4.2. Spirits can influence us positively as well as negatively

Participant: You know how you said spirits connect to us in our anger? Do spirits help us along in our true self as well?

There are certainly spirits that help us with our true self, but they are always going to be spirits who love us; in other words they're going to be loving spirits. Any spirit who loves you will want you to connect with your real self, no matter what's in there. And if what's in there is a bit of rage or anger or a childhood rage - I'm talking about childhood rage or grief or whatever - then those spirits who love us will want to help us connect to those emotions. But spirits who don't care about us very much, they are more interested in connecting to us through our addictions. So these are the malevolent spirits. In the Padgett messages, we called them the evil ones. They're not permanently evil in that they could change; just like any other person can change, but they desire to influence us in our addictions so that they can get their addictions met.

Spirits who love us help us connect to our true self, whereas evil spirits connect to us through our addictions

4.2.1. An example of spirits connecting to people drinking alcohol on Earth

So you imagine if I'm a drinker on Earth, an alcoholic on Earth, and I pass over into the spirit world. My physical addiction is alcohol abuse, and there's no alcohol in the spirit world - sorry for you guys who want they're to be, but that's the way it is. So what do I do? I'm looking for this addiction. I want this addiction. It's a physical addiction, not an emotional one that we're recognising at this point. We're just focusing on a physical one. What am I going to do? The only thing that's open to me to do, unless I deal with my emotional reason why I have the addiction, is to go and find a person on Earth that I can connect with and share in the experience of drinking alcohol.

This is why you have people on Earth, they're sitting in the bar, they don't even know who they are, and yet they are still standing upright drinking. They've drank enough to kill a horse but they're still drinking. Why? Because it's not just them sharing in the act. It's now all these spirits. But what's motivating the person on Earth? Well they're in an addiction too; an addiction of avoiding their emotions. It might their fear, unworthiness or some other really painful emotions from their life experience, but while they're avoiding that emotion, they turn to drink and that helps them avoid the emotion. But unfortunately some of the spirits who also want to avoid their emotions share in that process and make the process even worse. That's what happens. The spirits who love us don't do that. The spirits, who love us care about our worth, care about our progress, they want us to connect to God and so therefore they don't desire us to stay in our addictions.

4.3. Self punishment is an addiction which is worsened by evil spirits

Participant: AJ, whenever I try and get real about my true self and about how I actually am, I get into a real self judging place, and I don't know how to see myself as I am without going to that judging place.

So you go into self punishment?

Participant: Yeah.

Yeah, self punishment is also an addiction. And we need to come to recognise that it is. So what would you do if you were in another addiction - let's say you had a problem with smoking and you were giving it up. What would you do? Would you have the smokes lying by the bedside table? You wouldn't, would you? What would you do with them?

Participant: Get rid of them.

Yeah. Most people jump up and down on them and throw them in the bin and then later on at night search through the bin for that. You see, what we often do is we revert back to the behaviour that is a part of the addiction.

Self punishment is an addictive behaviour established usually by our parents, actually. We learnt when we were young children that one way to get mum and dad's approval is to agree with their punishment of us. So therefore we go into this self punishment phase every time we notice something that we feel is bad about ourselves. Now self punishment is also an addiction. So we need to address that as an addiction rather than actually acting out the self punishment and punishing ourselves even further. So we'll talk about how to do that later in the discussion. As long as you understand at this point that self punishment, self attack, is an addiction in itself. And we need to address that addiction if we really want to progress.

Now the problem is when I'm prepared to punish myself, evil spirits who are around me are also then prepared to punish me, so they come in and even worsen the emotion. [00:46:41.06]

Participant: And that's what happens because instantly I just hear them, "You're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad".

Yeah. They'll start saying things to you, saying, "You're a bad person anyway". Because what do they want you to do? They want you to give up the quest for truth and love and go back to satisfying their addictions, whatever those addictions were. That's what they want to do. So they want you to punish yourself because in a place of self punishment, you often just give up and go, "Ah, blow this," and usually we use an "f" word or two. "Blow this! I'm tired of feeling this bad", and no wonder because you're punishing yourself all the time. So we go, "I'm tired of feeling this bad, I'm just going to give up anyway and I'll just go back to my old life." How many of you have thought like that doing that in the last six months? Exactly. It's something that happens on a regular basis and it's something we need to deal with as an addiction.

We have that addiction because we're invested in our parent's viewpoint of ourselves. So when our parents punished us, they needed a justification for that punishment and so what we start doing is we start justifying to ourselves our own punishment of ourselves. Now God doesn't want you to punish yourself, God wants you to change. You're not going to change while punishing yourself more. We're only going to change if we realise that that's one of our addictions and what it's related to. We'll talk more about what it's related to perhaps at another time.

Participant: My question was so similar it's probably been answered.

Okay.

4.4. Gaining faith by receiving Divine Love

Participant: AJ in regards to faith, I heard you on a download recently say that faith comes to us in a similar way to the Holy Spirit, and I've had my guides often mention to pray for faith. So we're asking for God to give us faith or is it something that we can bring from within us? I presume it's going to help us to feel where we are or to see us how we really are.

The irony, Dave, is that true faith, really only comes from Divine Love entering the soul. When you feel that Love entering your soul for the first time, you'll realise number one that God exists, number two that God can give you Love and number three that you can receive it. Now in that place you now have greater faith. And then as God gives you more and more love your faith will grow.

So the truth is that a prayer for faith is just often a prayer for more love so that we can have a greater personal experience. Now in that talk about faith I said that faith is a real thing. It's a substantial thing. It's not something that we invent in our mind and then go ahead with. Faith is something that's happened to us. So as the Divine Love enters you it happens to you. The event happens inside of yourself and since that event happens, you now can have faith in it happening again. But before that event happens it's very hard to have faith that it's going to happen. It's only when it happens that the faith generally is present. [00:49:59.15]

So a prayer for faith is actually a longing for God to demonstrate to you that you have reasons to have faith in God. And when you think about it there is a lot of external help that we can receive to help us to have faith in God; help from our spirit friends, help from our experiences in our day-to-day life, and also examples that we see of other people who are in a place where they're received Divine Love. So we have many examples that we can emulate, and that gives us faith. But the true faith, the one that is the conviction inside, only really occurs once we're received Divine Love the first time and then after that the faith begins to grow.

Participant: So we can use our intellect to develop a pseudo faith until we get that real faith?

We can, but it's not real, is it? You need to use your intellect to work things out, just like I said in that message that I just read. You do need to use your mind to analyse things but at the end of the day until you have the experience real faith will not be present.

Many Christian people in Christian religions have had the experience. They have had the experience of having Divine Love enter them and so they have faith but then what they start to do is they start to believe the reason why they had the experience was because they believed in the blood of Jesus. And they believed in all these different belief systems, some of which are very different to each other, even though the two people had the same experience. So you might have two people in different religions with different beliefs having the same experience and they think it's because of their different beliefs but it's not; it's because they had a longing for Divine Love in that moment, and they had the experience, and the experience transformed their soul. Now they had some faith. But then they start putting their faith in the wrong direction instead of putting their faith in the feeling that I longed for God's Love, or I had a feeling of remorse about my life, and then God's Love entered me; oh I can replicate that. It's got nothing to do with the belief systems that I've got, it's got everything to do with the feelings that I had with God, and that's what we need to come to appreciate. [00:52:16.17]

Participant: So is our prayer for faith different to our prayer for Divine Love?

Well, yeah, you could say in a way that until you receive Divine Love, true faith will not actually occur inside of your soul because you're not yet having the experience. However you do need to have some kind of belief that it's going to happen, otherwise you wouldn't even bother praying for Love in the first place! So we can actually pray that we actually get inside of us some kind of proof that comes from external systems into us, and that if we pray we'll get an answer. We need to have some of that intellectual thought as well in the process. So it's not just all the heart, none of the mind, but rather we need to use our mind in harmony with investigating truth and then you'll find you'll have the experience. Once you have the experience, you have the proof and then you can work on replicating the experience by using that proof and evidence you have.

4.5. All addictions are harmful

Participant: Hello, AJ, I am Carlos. When it comes to addictions most people refer to something that is negative; you mentioned smoking or drinking or whatever. What happens when the addiction actually happens to be a positive one such as, I care more about other people than myself or I do more to help others that I would do to help myself?

It's a very good question. And can I give you a very blunt answer?

Participant: Please do.

There is no such thing as a positive addiction.

Participant: You just answered the question! (Laughter)

There is no such thing as a positive addiction. See this is one reason why we justify the holding on to some of our addictions - because we believe they're positive. We believe they're good. We believe they're going to be good for other people. So what do I do? I want to help other people. I help other people. I help people. I'm saying, "This is a wonderful addiction that I have because I'm helping so many people", but you know what we're doing in the end? We get exhausted. There's the proof, you see love doesn't exhaust itself.

Look at God. There's God giving out love, giving out love, and then all of a sudden God goes, "I'm tired now. I'll have a rest from giving out love." Is that how it works? But that's how we are when we're in the addiction of so called giving love. You see when we're not in the addiction of giving so called love, and we're really in a place of love, you will not be exhausted from giving, ever. The exhaustion is proof that the love isn't there because once we're at-one with God we will not have the exhaustion in play.

So every addiction is unloving. Every single one of them. There's no such thing as a positive addiction. That's going to be challenging for some of you. [00:55:34.17]

4.6. Spirits use us to satisfy their addictions

Participant: AJ not long ago you said that spirits want me to satisfy their addictions. It's something that I have really struggled with really grasping. Are you willing to talk more about that?

Yes. I'm going to do a whole section on the spirit interplay with addictions because it's very important to understand the spirit interplay. You see you may have no other person surrounding you on Earth and yet you might still be heavily in addictions because you're in addiction with the spirits who are surrounding you. And so it's very important to understand the interplay that happens between yourself and your own addictions and how that draws these spirits into play, and then what they do with that.

What they do is they revert to bribery in order to satisfy your addictions, threats in order to trigger your fear or total blackmail in order to remove so called love from you completely so you get back into line. Now many of you have already had this happen with your family, your friends and other people around you with regard to trying to get closer to God. These are addictions in play from their point and also from ours that cause an interplay emotionally and we need to address them. We need to find out more about them so I'll be dealing with those subjects more specifically as we go on today. [00:57:08.04]

4.7. Praying for help in dealing with anger and addictions

Participant: If I am hearing this information for the first time. My question is about faith. I should then apply my faith so that when I'm feeling angry about something, my faith can kick in and I might not know what the addiction is.

You can have, like you say, faith that you must have the addiction otherwise the anger wouldn't be present.

Participant: And so where do I go from there?

Okay well what I would do is I'd talk to God. I'd go, "I'm angry." So now I'm being more truthful with God, I'm admitting that I'm angry. "I've obviously got an addiction in play, I've obviously got a demand or an expectation that's not being met, otherwise I wouldn't be angry. But I've got no idea what it is. Can you help me find what it is?" And then there are a whole series of other events that happen where God can help you with some positive spirits, with different events on Earth, the Law of Attraction and so forth over the coming week that will tell you what it is, if you're open to hearing about it.

The problem with our addictions is that we're a bit closed about hearing about them. You think about it. The person who's smoking is going, "Yeah I need to give this up. It feels pretty good though, doesn't it? I know it's killing me but..." Do they really see their addiction yet? Not really yet because the moment they see their addiction in their feelings, now they'll stop smoking and they'll realise, "Actually by me continuing to smoke while I'm thinking these things, I'm already demonstrating I don't want to see my full extent of my own addiction."

This is what we often do in our day-to-day life with our emotional addictions. We notice them, we get told them, most of the time we get told them through our Law of Attraction or through our prayer and how God answers our prayer. However we want to continue them because they are so entrenched within us and we're so afraid of what they cover over, that we want to revert to them. [00:59:31.21]

Participant: So there's a certain amount of self-deception there at that second layer.

Yes.

Participant: You might be getting angry and you might have this realisation that you do have an addiction but there's a certain amount associated with the addiction that's self-deception that puts you in that same place, isn't it?

Yeah, we can even admit that we have the addiction but often we will stay in it until we have a desire to release the addiction.

4.8. We need a desire for God to deal with every addiction and fear

In the end, Jen, the real thing gets down to how much do you want a relationship with God because if you want a relationship with God really badly, you will deal with every addiction and every fear but if you don't want a relationship with God badly enough, you won't. It's just that simple. When an addiction gets triggered, or a fear gets triggered, you'll just go back to your old patterns, if you don't want your relationship with God badly enough. This also applies where you might badly want a soulmate, you badly want a partner in your life and all those kind of things, but honestly, unless you want God you are not going to deal with your addictions with your partner either because sooner or later your partner will satisfy some of your addictions and you'll stagnate until you want to grow beyond that point. [01:00:42.23]

4.9. Gaining faith that God is good and God loves us

Participant: Then that brings in other aspects of things like desire versus how much pain that you're in. So how much from your heart do you actually desire to change your life and connect to a God who you may not, because of your addiction, actually know exists.

Or even believe is good.

Participant: Yes.

Or even believe cares about you or any of those things, and this is the terrible damage of error on the planet. The terrible damage of error is that we have all these concepts of God that are very distorted and untrue. And because of that, the soul, the true self, is so constricted and trapped by all these false beliefs, all these false notions, and all these false feelings that we have about God and the universe and how everything works, that we can't even trust God enough to say, "No surely God must be good. Surely I can start with that one truth." A lot of us can't even start there.

That's why a lot of times I've been encouraging people to try to deal with their emotions to a degree first because at the end of the day unless you deal with some of them you won't even see what's there to even think that there's a God out there that wants to connect with you. And I feel often quite sad when I look at the world because I see how strongly man's false belief systems and all of their pressures to maintain these false beliefs cause the individual self, the person who is struggling to have a joyful life, to actually connect to the one true source who can give them that joyful life. It's such a sad thing to see that we've got to go through all this fear and addictions and emotions and grief and anger just to even realise that there's a God that loves us and wants to connect to us. [01:02:37.08]

Participant: So it seems to me my question's answered because I was going to ask a question about faith.

Well yeah, you can see how faith is important. I've got to at least at some point, at least in my head even, even if it's not yet in my heart; think there must a God there that I can actually receive some Love from. Otherwise I'm never going to start the process. And that's the sad thing that's happened to our world is that there's so much belief about there not being a God, that God's forgotten us, God's dead, or God's a punishing God, or God's like my dad or God's like my mum and my dad and mum weren't that good.

So we often impose a lot of these false beliefs upon God and in the process that causes us to not have much faith. Why would I long for love from a God like that? Or why would I long for love from a being that doesn't even exist? So I don't even start. And that's the sad thing I find.

If you start, you will start to have some experiences that will tell you. And this is why we say in the spirit world quite often to spirits just try the experiment. Be like a scientist who for the first time doesn't have a concept of something, doesn't know about it, doesn't understand it, but the scientist at least has a thought, "Oh maybe this might be true, I'll give it a go. I will put together a group of experiments that I can test to see whether this is true or not." We at least need to do that at the beginning. [01:04:20.23]

4.10. Dealing with disillusionment about failing to find truth in the past

Participant: Yeshua I have had a lot of pain most of my life.

Physical pain?

Participant: That and emotional pain, whole soul pain, and it's been so difficult and I've just had one thing, trauma after trauma after trauma, right throughout my life. At some stage I really wanted to get to the truth so I wanted to find out what was going on, what was causing this pain. And what I ended up on a journey was going into with this questioning and search for truth and search for just some form of relief from this pain. And so I entered and settled into an area where I thought was going to give me a huge amount of answers, which was the New Age, going into every healing modality that you could possibly imagine, and I actually see now how much I gave my power away to believing that a crystal was going to take that pain away from me, that it was going to give me the resolution that I really desired. And I put a lot of faith into those modalities and into those things because they were telling me that that was going to fix me.

So you put a lot of faith in false beliefs, what you now see as false beliefs.

Participant: Yes, they were really just working with the effects of it and giving me a short term effect or solution.

But then the problem kept recurring.

Participant: But eventually at the end of it, I would think, "Oh I'm free of that! That's great, I've got through that," and then all of a sudden down the track I would find myself back to square one. Every time.

The same thing again.

Participant: And now I see myself bury that truth, buried under all of these things that I just really haven't dealt with, which I thought I was dealing with all those years. And so I now have addiction to truth, to get to that true self and to that relationship with God.

You also have another addiction though, and that is an addiction to not feeling your feelings of disillusionment. You see a lot of times we've had years of searching, searching for this, searching for that. After a while we start getting quite hurt about all these searches that we're involved in, and we start feeling quite disillusioned about every search. Every search ends in a dead end.

We have the cycle of the search. The cycle of the search generally is, "Oh it's going really, really good. Yeah I really feel this is it!" Enthusiastically, "This is going to work. Oh no, now this is going to work for me. Now it's permanent. I think I'm fixed now." And all of a sudden, I realise I'm not fixed. No I've still got some work. Oh, no, it's actually worse than that, I'm still actually right back at the beginning. And I go through this terrible phase of you could call almost depression, where I go, "Oh I just want to give up now. I don't see any point." We get real down about ourselves and depressed and low and then of course we lift ourselves out of that slowly, and we search for another one. And then we go through the same cycle. And the main reason why that happens is actually because of our addictions and fears. [01:07:44.01]

Emotional cycles of highs and lows while searching for truth can often led to depression

One of our addictions we have is that we don't want to feel the feeling of being disillusioned with error. We don't want to actually just go into that grief place of feeling we've searched all of our life and just wanting not to be depressed about it, which is the suppression of the emotion, but just to feel the feeling of just being totally disillusioned with the entire process and how much that interferes with our trust that God exists even, and that God really wants to connect with us. And that's an emotion you need to let yourself feel. You're connecting to it a little bit now, but that's the emotion you need to let yourself address a little more. Let yourself feel the disillusionment you feel, the disillusionment about the search.

A lot of our physical ailments in particular are created from emotions we feel about ourselves but we're yet to release because we've been in our addiction. You see, a lot of times we can't discover truth until we let go of the emotion inside of us, which is this panic to find the truth. Because when we're panicked to find the truth, we're not actually in a state of longing for truth, we're in a state of fearing what the truth is, and we need to release that at some point to discover truth.

So there are a lot of emotions that we are often in our addiction with. Disillusionment. Another type of emotion that Mary had was cynicism, and those kinds of emotions are all covers, if you like, over deep fears related to deep grief that we have about the world, the environment that we're living in and so forth, and even deep grief that we have about God, that we feel God doesn't exist, we feel God doesn't care; "When's God ever wanted to have a relationship with me?" Now we're not realising in that place that God has always wanted a relationship with you, just not the addictive relationship you've had with your parents or some other person around you. So feel the disillusionment feeling. Let yourself feel that.

Participant: Yeshua, can you just talk about the...

By the way, guys, if you're uncomfortable calling me Yeshua, don't do it! Can I just say that to you? If you're uncomfortable calling me Jesus, don't do that either. Don't break your true self. If you're comfortable calling me AJ, call me AJ. Just don't call me late for dinner. (Laughter) Go on.

Participant: Yeshua, can you just talk about the subtleties of addictions? Because I feel that there's a heap in there.

I want to go into this in a lot of detail. Yes. At this stage, what I want is for everyone to understand the overall picture of it all, if you like, and how it's interfering with your relationship with God. So as long as you all get that at this point, we can proceed onto the nitty gritty of our presentation. Are there any questions related to the overall picture and then we can move on. [01:11:17.10]

4.11. Connecting to God while taking responsibility for our lives

Participant: I've just got a question about desire for God. Obviously with the anger, the addiction, the fear, our desire for God, like you're saying, is ten minutes in a day when we're in our true self. I was just thinking that I'm learning about responsibility so all of a sudden I'm in a full time job and I'm finding that that's disconnected me from my inner child in that time a lot. So my connection with God is not there, just like you described.

Can I mention to you though that there is no reason why your connection with God can't be there while you're in your full time job. For example when I was younger I used to be a cleaner, so I used to clean windows for a living. I did that for nearly two years. And the beauty of cleaning of course is that you can think a lot, and I used to love it. You see quite often we look at jobs that we have and we don't love them very much. But we're not thinking about the job and how it's benefiting other people, how it's benefiting the environment, how it's benefiting ourselves, we're focused on the chore of the job a lot of the times. We don't realise most of the time that actually we could probably be happy doing almost anything and the reason why we're not is usually because of some of our fears and addictions.

So if you have a full time job, you're taking responsibility now for your life, which is a very good thing. That is something God wants you to do, to take responsibility for your life but now work on enjoying taking responsibility for your life. Do you see? [01:13:04.09]

Participant: Well that wasn't totally true, I do still connect with God whilst doing things in the job that I like, like when I'm in a desire, but it's not with everything.

4.12. Both removing addictions and developing desire are required to connect to God

Participant: What I'm really interested about is developing this burning desire for God and it seems that the only way about that is to get really clear about the addictions, really pray about them and do something about changing ourselves.

Yeah I don't know if I can agree that it's only that. I feel that is a part of it.

For example, Amon and Aman, the first human couple that many of you know of as Adam and Eve, they began life in perfection, but they walked away from God. Now they did that because of their desires; their desires led them in that direction. They desired something that in the end caused them to break God's Laws to get it, and as a result of that they had the results of their degradation basically.

Now the truth is we can be perfect and therefore have no addictions, but still have desires that take us away from God. So we need to do two things. We need to deal with our addictions that are in disharmony with our desires for God, but at the same time have a longing and desire for God. We need to do both at the same time. And that's an important part of this process. What I'm trying to address here is one half of the equation. The other half of the equation is the half of desire. Remember I had a talk recently about the Law of Desire and how desire is such a powerful force in the way that God's created her universe. And so my suggestion is to use both desire as well as addiction.

Now what happens with addictions is addictions suppress desires. They make us think we have a desire when really all we have is an addictive longing to address a fear. [01:15:13.06]

4.12.1. An example of acting in fear vs. desire in preparation for Earth changes

So, for example, many of us hear about Earth changes. We go, "There's Earthquakes now going on and there's this going on and there's that going on and it just seems to be reaching more and more intensity around the Earth," and what's starting to happen inside of us for many of us is fear starting to come. And so the fear is starting to go, "I don't think it's very safe by the coast, I think I might need to move inland a bit or move somewhere else." The fear is now dictating my action, is it not?

Now, is that a desire? From God's perspective, no, that's not a desire; that's just an addictive response to the fear that you have. So what do we do? We run off looking at this house, we run off looking at that house, we look at this other house. We're going around like "a chook with its head cut off" as the saying goes trying to assuage our fear thinking that we're acting upon a desire. But that's not true, we're acting upon a fear and we're in our addiction.

To act upon our desire I would go, "What are my long term desires and goals in life? What do I want to finish up doing with my life in the long term? Do I want to live on the coast? Do I want to live inland? What do I want to create in the long term? What kind of job or what kind of tasks would I like to perform? Where are my passions? Am I passionate about music? Am I passionate about mathematics? Am I passionate about science? What are my passions?" And I would embrace those passions and do it like it's going to happen for the rest of your life, and you'll be led to the right location, automatically.

That's the difference between living in your addiction and living in your desire. A desire has much more pure motivation than your addictions. So many of us feel we're in our desire when we're actually in our addiction because we're acting upon our fears. Remember the purpose of addiction is always to assuage or make better or make the fear go away. That's what the purpose of the addiction is; to make the fear go away so I don't have to feel the fear. So, Josh, hopefully that shows that there's two parts to the equation. There's the addiction part, which we do need to address, but there's also the pure desire part that we need to address. [01:17:40.18]

4.13. Baptism is not an effective way of removing unlovingness from ourselves

Participant: From a religious context is the belief of what a baptism is supposed to perform for people a breaking of the layers to accept the Holy Ghost from a physical perspective?

Well I suppose for each different form of religion they have different views of baptism. There are some who believe in infant baptism, some in adult baptism and so forth. Many of them believe that the baptism is the washing away of sin and in fact there are certain comments in the Bible that would perhaps lead you to believe that.

If we view this - the layers around our true self; the anger, addictions and fear - as all the unlovingness within us; that's everything that creates our unloving thoughts, our unloving words and our unloving actions. That is all the unlovingness inside of us; the fear of our true self, the addictions and the anger and other emotions like that, and we then go down the track of going, "Alright, that's the unlovingness inside of me, and if I get myself baptised, that washes away all the unlovingness."

The layers around our true self are the unlovingness inside of ourselves

Now have you seen that in practice? Have you seen every Christian that's ever been baptised all of a sudden go from being a sinner to a saint? No? So does it work? No. You see this is one of things we need to come to terms with on the Earth. We need to look at what happens and see the results and then use your head and go, "Hmm, that action didn't seem to perform what they wanted it to perform so maybe it's not worth much." [01:19:27.25]

So it's quite logical to see that actually these layers around your true self are not going to go away from you just by you getting baptised. They're only going to go away from you by having a baptism of the soul; the transformation of the new birth that I spoke about being born again inside of your soul, is the way the transformation happens. Not through baptism.

So baptism is just again another way mankind has tried to copy something that happened in my life and turn it into something that has some effect but in reality the only reason why I got baptised was because I wanted to demonstrate that my soul had already experienced the new birth and I felt a completely different person as a result of that. The illustration came to me that it's like the washing away of all sin. And so I thought, "Yeah I'll go down to John and get myself baptised," as a personal thing for myself to mark the occasion, like a celebration to mark the occasion of my being born again. That was the only purpose of it. But now what man has done with that is they said, "Right, if you go and get baptised then you'll be a new man or a new woman." And yet, when you look around you and see all the people who've been baptised, do you see many of them being a new man or a new woman? Don't you see them with the same errors, the same angers, the same addictions, the same fears? Many times you do.

So baptism itself is totally ineffectual in actually creating a difference. The baptism of the soul, which only occurs through the flowing of love, has certainly got the capability of making that transformation. [01:21:26.04]

4.14. Developing a desire for God

Participant: I've got a question about the desire and finding the true self. I'm really confused when you follow your desires and you feel them mature and you get excited and everything. And then you dream and you've got joy and satisfaction of following what you really want to do but then at the same time I don't have a longing for God. I feel happy because I'm finding myself but I don't have this big desire for God. Is that something to do with being self-reliant again and not trusting in God?

Yes. As I've said to you over and over the most difficult emotion the human race has to give up is this issue of self-reliance. That's the most difficult emotion that we've got to give up. Most of us, if we're honest with ourselves, don't have very strong longings for God. A lot of times it's because of our beliefs about God, mind you, because we have all these different beliefs that God doesn't want to be involved in my life, that God's ineffectual, that God doesn't really care about me as a person individually. And in fact we're taught by a lot of religion as well that God is like this big power that has a big picture view but isn't involved in the individual. And so that teaching becomes a part of our soul as well.

So when we think about God, "Oh yeah, God's up there somewhere but let's get on with my life and sort out my life," and we have more of that kind of feeling sometimes. But at some point if you really want to engage your life fully you need to come to terms with the fact that actually there is a God who is personally interested in you and in fact She is your Mother, She is your Creator, the Creator of the soul, the true self. [01:23:21.04]

And often it's our distance from our own true self that causes us to not actually feel this link with our Creator, which is personal, like a link with any other individual. It's a personal relationship that we're trying to develop. And as a result of that, we use our addictions and our fears and other feelings about God and we become self-reliant and we go off on our self-reliant course. And that, if you think about it, is what the New Age movement in itself is very much about. The New Age movement is often telling us we are all Gods. We're all a part of God. So what does that do? It depersonalises God. So if you now have to have a relationship with a depersonalised God, is that going to happen? It's definitely not going to happen.

A relationship can only happen when you feel the personality of God and that can only happen through desire. And if you find your desire for God is suppressed then there are definitely addictions in play. So allow yourself to pray about those addictions that are in play. Now those addictions are often addictions that have been with mankind many thousands of years and they are hard to remove because we are so distant from our true self with those particular groups of addictions relating to God and what we expect of God.

4.15. Following loving desires leads us to God

Participant: If I've got a desire to do something would I still do it and ask myself why I don't have this longing for God? Or would I stop following my desires?

Always follow your desires. Always follow your desires. Your desires will always lead you to God if they are loving. If they are not loving, the Law of Attraction will bring you corrections to those desires so that you turn them into being loving. So always follow your desires. Your desires will lead towards God because ironically one of the things God wants for you, as a person, is just what you want for your own children, and that is for them to become themselves and passionately enjoy their own life. That is what God desires for you as well; that you become yourself and passionately enjoy your own life. However God wants you to do that in harmony with love because the way God's created Her Universe is that if you don't do it in harmony with love there will be corrective measures from the laws, which will correct you and change you. [01:25:52.25]

Now whether you feel those corrections on this Earth, or, like many of the spirits who are in the room right now feeling them now when they're in the spirit world, either way you will eventually feel them. And so what we want to do is allow ourselves to follow our desires and eventually what will happen is we'll discover God in that process. If we really passionately follow our desires we will always discover God.

5. How addictions affect our lives emotionally

Shall we move on to the real subject? So that was the just the summary of the subject! We really want to focus on this aspect of the addictions and what happens with these addictions because it's these addictions that prevent us from being harmonious with love and they prevent our connection with God.

What I want to do now is talk a little bit about the process of the addictions and what happens when they come into play. You see addictions all begin from a desire to avoid or escape our fears, so when we're in our addictions we are having a desire to avoid or escape the fears that we have.

5.1. Expectations and demands result from our addictions

Now there are two things normally that we do with our addictions. We normally have some expectations or we have demands, and these expectations and demands are the things we want our environment to do to fix our fear.

5.1.1. An example of blaming the government for natural disasters

So you see this in play a lot in governments and everyday life. So for example, there's a flood in Queensland and this flood affects lots of people. They have all sorts of things happening as a result. Some have lost their homes, some have lost their livelihood, and some have lost their families even. And there are all these emotions that come up as a result of this loss from what we would call, and what generally is called, a natural disaster. But all of a sudden the government has responsibilities that it never had before to make some of these pains go away.

Now what we often do is instead of addressing the pains and feeling our own pain, and realising that if we feel it our pain will go away, what we do is we want the environment or someone in the environment to make the pain go away. So for example, imagine for a moment that one of the reasons why my house got washed down the river was because the government did something up the river to a water course, where they didn't clean it out or they did clean it out - one of two. They did something to the water course thinking they were doing the right thing and as a result of them doing that thing, my house got washed away. Where's all my pain going to focus on now? It's going to focus on the people who did that action. [01:29:59.16]

5.2. Our addictions make our happiness dependent upon our environment

If I'm unwilling to feel my own pain, I will focus that pain on something external in my environment, whether it be a particular person, a particular organisation, or the government and so forth. I will focus my expectations and demands. But we're not realising in that place that the expectations and demands are actually unloving in themselves. Do you think that a person who completely loves ever has an expectation or a demand of anyone? No. The truth is that when you are completely loving you will never have an expectation or demand of any other person. In fact you won't even expect that they treat you nicely. You won't even expect that they might not kill you at some point. You won't have that expectation. And you'll be joyous in not having the expectation. You'll actually be happy about not having the expectation.

So every expectation and demand we have is unloving but it's the addiction to avoiding the underlying fears and grief that cause us to go into this place of expectations and demands. Now when we go into expectations and demands, what happens then, whenever the expectation is met, we feel this emotion called happy or content, and whenever the expectation or demand is not met, we go into this other emotion called anger, rage. Do we feel very happy? No, unhappy.

Can you see that our own expectations and demands create our own unhappiness? You see every single time I am addicted to someone else fulfilling an expectation or demand that I have for me, I am now setting up a dynamic where my happiness is completely dependent upon my environment.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't want my happiness completely dependent on my environment. And if you think about it logically, why would we? Basically that means: there are nearly seven billion people on the Earth and I'm dependent on every one of those doing the right thing by me to be happy. What are the chances of that happening? It's hard enough having one of them do something that fulfils my expectation, let alone seven billion. So if I set up these expectations and demands inside of myself, avoiding my emotions in the process, wanting other people around me, my environment, to actually fix my life and make me happy, I'm actually setting up a thing in my life that I'm always probably going to be unhappy. I'm going to be unhappy most of the time.

That's the trouble with addictions, you see, a lot of the times we think that they create our happiness but the problem is they only create our happiness under one circumstance and that is when people fulfil our expectations and addictions. That's the only time they make us happy.

Now I don't know about you but it doesn't seem to me to be a very logical thing to do to make your own happiness so dependent upon everyone else on the Earth. And then, if we add into the mix the spirits around us, how many of those are there? There are billions of them as well. So now I need all the people on Earth and all of the people in the spirit world to do exactly what I want to be happy. I don't know about you but that seems to me it's going to be highly unlikely I'll ever be happy.

Now that is the problem with addiction but you see most of us are very, very afraid of getting under the addiction. Remember from our previous diagram we said the addiction is covering over the fear and the fear is covering over our true causal self, our true causal emotions, which is usually some grief.

5.3. Our addictions prevent us from connecting to God

Can you see, even being in the addiction, we're two layers away from ever connecting to God. Because remember it's only our causal emotions, which are often grief, that we're actually going to connect to God. And so what we're doing is by staying in our addictions, we're preventing our own happiness, and we're setting up expectations and demands that are never going to be met. It's totally illogical to believe they're ever going to be met, because seven billion people are never going to meet all of my addictions. Not in your entire life will that ever happen. So I'm setting up all these unloving things and on top of that I am two steps away from connecting with God. It doesn't seem very logical in the end if you want to have a relationship with God to actually stay in your addictions.

But we are usually so afraid. Our fear is so great, palpable, we're in such a panic to get into any deeper emotions that it seems to us that our addictions are a better place to live in than feeling the grief. And yet our addictions are totally illogical. It's totally illogical to stay there. Can you see how crazy it is? We set up these dynamics in our life and we go for the thing that we think is going to make it all better, but in the process we're guaranteeing it's going to be worse. And that's the thing we face with addictions.

Can you see the dynamic that we're setting up for yourself when you're in them? That's very, very important to breaking them because if you don't see this is the truth of what's happening with these addictions, in the end you won't want to break them. You'll want to live in them but you're keeping yourself from God, and you're keeping yourself from any form of happiness really in the end because it's highly unlikely everyone is going to ever meet your addictions or ever meet your expectations and your demands that come from your addictions. It's highly unlikely. And so you're setting up your own unhappiness. [01:37:20.16]

5.4. Fatalism is a way to avoid our emotions

Participant: AJ, I have a question about fatalism. It's about non-expectation and non-demands.

Fatalism? Yep. Where you're basically numb to having anything met?

Participant: Yeah. So you go, "Oh well, you know, this is my life, sort of thing." So is that even a step further away from realising you've got expectation and demands?

Yeah it is. Because what does fatalism help you do? It numbs you to your own grief. I was great at fatalism. I was a bit of a shocker with it actually because what I used to do is I used to go to myself, "They've just treated me really badly. Oh, poor people, that's sad", and I'd go through all this stuff and going, "I know I didn't deserve it but obviously they felt that I did," and you know I start explaining to myself all of their feelings. And all that did was help me get away from how I felt about getting treated badly.

Ironically when I felt what it felt like to be treated badly I started getting treated better. That's the Law of Attraction at work, right? So while you tune away from your true emotions and stay in fatalism, fatalism is a way of avoiding how bad you feel about your life. It's going, "Oh well, that's how it goes. Let's get on with it," and it's a way of brushing under the carpet all the emotions. And remember every time you brush under the carpet the emotions, what are you doing? You're distancing yourself from God. So you've just made a step to get away from your emotions which have hurt, and you want to get away from those hurt-based emotions because you want to go into this place of fatalism because you don't want to feel the pain of the grief. But in the process of shovelling it under the carpet you've just disconnected yourself from any relationship with God, which is the primary source of your happiness. Again not a very logical thing to do.

So if you feel a sense of fatalism, start asking yourself, instead of feeling fatalistic about this, can I now go a bit deeper into it and feel how bad it feels to be treated this way, or how bad that particular event felt. I need to feel how it was. If there are feelings there, I'll feel them and release them.

6. Others manipulate our addictions through bribery, threats and blackmail

Participant: With the expectations and demands, within that would be control, which is one of my favourites, wouldn't it? (Laughter)

Of course, yes, expectations and demands are all about control.

Participant: Wonderful I recognised it! And that's where the unloving spirits kick in as well.

We'll talk a bit more after the break how they kick in, but yes, it's through the addiction they kick in. But what often happens is that they give us our expectation as long as we meet their demand. So they set up a cycle of what I'd call co-dependence, where I'm giving you something because I know that if I give you that thing, you will give me a reciprocal thing that I want.

Ladies, many of you have done this with your sexual relationships actually; where you've actually entered into a sexual relationship uncertainly because you didn't know whether you really wanted it or not, but you want the other thing you're getting back more strongly, and that might have been approval or acceptance, or it might have been the feeling you're being loved or it might have been security, and you were willing to sacrifice one thing in order to get the other, and that's what I call bribery.

So what happens with all spirit interactions generally there will be one of three things going on, and the same occurs with most of addiction interactions on the Earth. There'll be bribery, then there'll be threats and when threats don't work then it's blackmail. And so this is why I want to get onto that part of the subject because at the end of the day, due to our addictions, we revert to some very unloving behaviour. And many of you in the last six months, by the way, have reverted to this behaviour in your day-to-day life in order to avoid your addictions.

Now the problem is often when our addictions are met, we go, "Oh our life's so wonderful, isn't it? I'm just feeling so happy with my life." And if you're feeling happy with your life but you're not yet at-one with God, that's a good indication that you are in heavy addiction because you'll be happy with your life completely when you're at-one with God, and you'll grow in happiness with your life until you get at-one with God, but if you're saying you're completely happy with your life and you're not at-one with God, there are a lot of addictions in play.

6.1. An example of a participant wanting her ex-partner to still be in love with her

Participant: AJ my question is if I'm really loving myself truthfully can I still be in an addiction?

Yep but see oftentimes we think it is loving to ourselves to actually get our addiction met. That's the problem, you see. You see most of the time when we look at our addictions we go, "No, no my addiction's good." Like, for example, do you mind me being personal?

Participant: No.

Okay. Well, you've had a few addictions this week actually that I can see publicly on the Internet actually.

Participant: That was really unloving.

Yeah but so I'm referring to... do you mind?

Participant: No.

Well you posted it on the Internet; I don't know how you would mind! But you were angry with an ex-partner for him having a relationship with a friend.

Participant: Yes.

Mind you he's not your partner anymore.

Participant: No.

So what's your addiction?

Participant: Control.

Well you want your ex-partner to still be in love with you even though you've gone off and gone with someone else.

Participant: Yep.

So what's that addiction? That's an addiction to have my ex-partner hung up on me. So there's a lot of anger in that addiction, can you see that? [01:43:55.23]

Participant: Yeah.

So there we go. There's the addiction in play. The addiction's in play, what do I do? I get really angry with my friend, which you felt?

Participant: And I did.

Yep. And the addiction totally motivated that unloving behaviour towards your friend. But she has a right to enter a relationship with a man who's not in a relationship, whether he's your ex-partner or not.

Participant: And that feeling I had at the time was, "They're not allowed to be happy."

Exactly! Why do you want them not to be happy?

Participant: Because I'm feeling miserable.

Okay. Well, you know, can you see how, "Oh, I'm miserable so everyone else in the world has got to be miserable too." Does that seem to be a loving thing?

Participant: No.

No. So can you see there must be some addictions in play with that. So this is where we've got to be very careful, Natalie, with regard to our emotions. We often think that that's good and then we reflect upon our behaviour and go, "Whoa, yeah that's not very loving." We start seeing actually that we were in the addiction when we did that, not in feeling good about anything.

6.2. An example of spirits bribing people with money

Oftentimes, we do this with a lot of our life unfortunately. What we do with our life is we often feel good when certain things happen but we're in an addiction with that happening. For example, you see this often with money, where a person receives some money and doesn't realise that right at that moment they're getting bribed by a spirit to do something that's bad with that money, and yet they see the receiving of the money as a good thing. So they're in their addiction. We see this happening quite a lot. We'll explain this after the break how spirits will often bribe you, they give you things that you think you feel that you want in order for you to then go and do what they want you to do with it. How do you get the average person to actually get involved in debauchery? You give him lots of money. [01:45:58.06]

Look at what the spirits do with that, with the person. It's very rare for a person to actually then use that money in a manner that's loving. Most of the time they finish up spending it on this, finish up turning to drugs, spending it on women, on sex, everything they didn't have up until that point most of the time. And so all that's happening is they were given some funds and all of a sudden their soul is now in this black place, much blacker than it was before they had the money. And yet some of them think that it was good, some of them. This is what often happens; we can easily be bribed if we haven't dealt with the emotions underlying meeting the expectations and demands of others.

6.3. An example of controlling family members using threats

For example, if you're in my family, the fastest way for me to deal with you in a controlling manner is to say to you, "If you do that, I'm never going to speak to you again." A lot of people change their mind after that statement, do they not? Why? Because I just used a threat, which is unloving, to control their behaviour. My attempt to control somebody else's behaviour is unloving and yet I've done it and I'm willing to ex-communicate a person from my family. Why would I do that? Because I want to control. That's the only reason why I do it. Because I want something myself. I want them to be with me not with anyone else. So we'll talk more about how these addictions get in play after the break.

7. How addictions affect our lives emotionally (continued)

7.1. Anger towards God and others indicates addictive demands

Participant: I'm starting to realise that if we have a really strong desire for God it could be an addiction expecting Him to love us.

We have a lot of addictions with God. And in fact God doesn't respond to addictive demands. That's one thing we need to remember about God. So this is one way that we can tell whether we have addictions with God. We pray, we pray, we pray, we pray... nothing happens. We pray, we pray... nothing happens. We pray, we pray... nothing happens. We pray... now, "F you, God, I'm not praying no more". That tells me that all the previous prayers were all addictions. They were all demands because remember the anger-based response is when the addiction or expectation or demand is not being met.

The truth is you will never get angry when you're out of your addictions. You'll never get angry again. I'm not talking about the childhood anger, where you're processing an emotion and you're laying on the ground just having a good scream, I'm talking about the adult anger where you're just in a rage because something that you wanted did not happen. And because something we wanted didn't happen we turned to anger, and the anger is telling us that actually none of what we just did was motivated by a pure motive; it was all motivated by an unloving motive, a motive to avoid a fear, or avoid some grief, or to control.

You see the anger is a very good guide. Remember three years ago now I gave a talk about, "The Human Soul - Anger is your guide". Many of you are yet to learn this actually; anger is your guide, telling you that, "Oh! I have an addiction, and it's unloving. That's what my anger is telling me." And if I look at my expectations and demands, in that addiction, I will find and discover the fear that those demands and expectations cover. And if I let myself feel those fears, as an emotion, I will actually get to the underlying reason why I did all that in the first place, and while I'm there, now God can connect to me. And God can connect to me because I'm now in my true self, I've now had an awakening to what's going on inside of my own soul because I wanted to, I made that choice to.

So when we're in these addictions, we are so far removed from God that we have no chance of connecting. We need to go in and down to get to the connection point.

So we need to go into the anger, we go, "Okay I'm angry, I'm angry. I admit that I'm angry. Okay there's an addiction in play. I'm angry so there's got to be an addiction." And even at that point most of us go, "No it's your fault I'm angry." For example, "It was my husband's fault; he didn't do the right thing by me." Or, "It was my wife's fault or my children's fault." It's always somebody else's fault, right? No, it's because you have expectations and demands that you're angry, that's the only reason why you're angry. So it's within me - my expectations, my demands - that create this rage within me. So I go, "Okay, there's an addiction inside of me that I desperately do not want to release. What is it?"

7.2. Identifying and working through our addictions

This is where prayer now comes into effect - where we can start praying for God to help us with finding what it is. Talk to our spirit guides who can lead us to show us what it is. Talk to other people about the addiction. "Oh, just the other day I discovered I've got this addiction that I want every woman to think I'm hot." So that's the addiction. "And if they don't think I'm hot I just dismiss them. Useless woman!" And I go off because they don't think I'm hot, right? That's the addiction.

So be honest. It feels terrible when you're honest with yourself and you go, "Wow, gee that's pretty bad really when you think about it. I basically want a sexual interaction with every woman I meet. That's a pretty dark emotion. And where do you think my soulmate is in that? I can't find her because she probably doesn't meet that emotion either and certainly wouldn't like to be a part of a relationship with a person who's constantly trying to sexually engage with others. So she's not going to probably be around much." [01:52:55.21]

And so what I do is I go, "Wow that's a pretty strong addiction. What's going on? What's the emotion under it?" You see if I judge it, I'm not going to find the emotion. If I condemn myself for it I'm not going to find the emotion. If I punish myself for it, I'm not going to find the emotion. I need to have an open hearted investigation into my own unlovingness. And once I do that, I go, "Wow, I've got a demand. That's a demand. Where did that come from?" I can pray about it, and start looking at some of my fears. What is my fear associated with that addiction? And a lot of the times our fears relate to how we view ourselves. So I might just feel by myself that if I'm by myself and no woman is interested in me, then basically I'm worthless to every woman. That might be a very big grief that I need to connect to. And on top of that will be some fear about that, that I'm never going to be with a woman because none of them are going to find me attractive. So at the end of the day, unless we're willing to face the truth of the addiction, we're never going to get below it.

7.3. Anger is never righteous

Participant: A lot of people, well some people anyway, feel that anger can be used positively.

(Laughs)

Participant: Like if they get angry it motivates them to, you know, "I'll prove to them that I can do it," sort of thing. You know, somebody put them down, "Oh you can't do this", or through their anger they prove that they do it. And like can anger ever be positive? There's that other thing about righteous anger, you know?

(Laughs) Yep. I'm sorry I'm laughing but it's because I can't help myself!

Participant: It's always about addiction, is it?

Yeah, there's no such thing as righteous anger. There's righteous firmness, if I'm firmly stating the truth. That's firmness but it's not anger and rage, not where I'm angry with the individual that I'm stating the truth to or anything like that. Anger always comes from addictions not being met. Always. And so if I'm even in righteous anger there's a reason why I think that my anger is righteous. Why would I think my anger is righteous?

Anybody is allowed to do anything to you; that's God's Law. God's Law is that they have free will. They're allowed to do anything to you. That means anything bad too, by the way. They're allowed to do anything bad to you. Why do you think in the first century I said, "Turn the other cheek" when someone slaps you on one of them? Why do you think I said that? Because I meant that. I meant that actually they're allowed to do that to you. They're allowed to do it but there are penalties associated with their soul if they do it. There are certain things that happen to their own soul as they do it but I don't have control over that because God's Laws already deal with all of that. God's got all these perfect laws in place already correcting every single being in the universe. So I don't need to be involved in that. If I get into righteous anger, trying to correct somebody else, I am automatically unloving. [01:56:28.21]

7.3.1. An example of Christians believing they're doing God's Will

Participant: What about the Christian concept of righteous anger, where you're doing God's Will?

All concepts of righteous anger are in the same boat in my opinion. There is no such thing as a concept of righteous anger where you're doing God's Will. That has justified so much war and so much damage in the history that if you think about the fruitage of that kind of thought; it demonstrates it's own error. You think about how much Christian religion has historically focused their intention on destroying. Not so much nowadays perhaps, but if you look at the two thousand years of Christian history, the Crusades and all of those different things, they're all there to change other people into what they believed to be right, which is a result of their righteous anger. They were willing to murder people in war to change them.

Now what are the results of that? The results of that is half the population on the planet hates Christianity. Does that seem like a logical loving thing to do? What did I encourage in the first century to do? I said to love your enemy. Would you kill your enemy if you loved them? Would you even yell at your enemy if you loved them? What does love do? Love doesn't yell at somebody does it? Love isn't rageful with somebody, is it? So would you even yell at somebody who's your enemy? Of course you wouldn't. You would firmly state the truth at times, perhaps, but you certainly wouldn't feel a feeling of rage towards them, and if you do, it's because of an addiction.

A lot of times the addictions related to that are, "God's not going to fix it, so I am." Or, "God's Laws don't deal with the fact that people do bad things, so I'm going to deal with it." It's sort of like the same thing that motivates vigilantism really in the end. "The government doesn't want to do it, so I'm going to do it instead." And all of those things are unloving. They're all based upon unloving demands and addictions inside of us and a misunderstanding of all of God's Laws in fact, because nobody ever gets away with anything in God's universe. Ever. Nobody ever does. [01:58:48.14]

7.3.2. An example of people rebelling against being told they're not capable of success

Participant: Just that little thing before about where somebody can feel that they can get angry because somebody's put them down and because of that anger they can achieve something that they wouldn't have achieved before.

But it's motivated by anger. So is there ever going to be a loving outcome?

Participant: Well a lot of people would think so.

I know they think so.

Participant: I know a lot of people have said I would achieve success because people put me down and they said, "You'll never be any good" and I got angry and said, "I'll show them" and so they achieved success. So what's going on there? What alternative would you have in that situation?

It's the addiction of rebellion. There's an addiction in rebellion.

And the addiction is, "I'm going to prove to somebody that what they think about me is not true." Now can you see that that in itself is not loving to yourself? Like, if I didn't believe it was true, would I be motivated to rebel? If I personally didn't believe that the attack that was put upon me is true, then why would I even feel bad about it at all? I wouldn't. So the fact is that if I'm acting in anger about an attack, then straight away it means I believe some of it. I believe some of those things that are being said about me.

7.3.3. An example of AJ not responding to attacks on the Internet

For instance, how many negative things get said about me already on the Internet? Why do you think you never hear from me in any one of those things? Because I feel what I feel as a result of it, and I just do that. That's all. I don't want to get angry with them. To get angry with them would automatically place me in a more unloving condition. That's what those spirits with them want. They want to degrade my soul by me engaging in an angry transaction with another person. I don't want to do that. I want to just feel my grief, if I have grief, about how I'm being treated. That's all. Once I feel it, I won't even believe anything that's being said about me, if it's not true. I won't even have a feeling about it and I'll still feel love towards those persons. So the righteous anger thing is definitely something that covers a lot of addictions. Mary wanted to say a little bit about it too. [02:01:12.03]

7.3.4. An example of people rebelling against being told they're not capable of success (continued)

Mary: Graham was referring to the person who might succeed externally but if they've acted out of rebellion against the feeling, which is, "I don't want to feel how terrible it feels that nobody believes I can do this," even when they achieve the thing, unless they've dealt with that emotion, they're still carrying the emotion in their soul. So in their true self have they really succeeded? They've just gone and really pushed themselves and laboured against a horrible emotion so hard to the point where they try to change other people's opinions so that other people feel differently about them so they don't have to feel the feeling, which initiated the entire process, which was, "I feel bad about myself because other people are saying this."

7.3.5. An example of using righteous anger to justify violence

Mary: And the other thing I was going to say about righteous anger was that I think it's synonymous with justified violence. I was someone who had a lot of righteous anger when I met AJ, and I quickly learnt that it was a very vicious emotion that I was putting out to the whole world around me; "You should change. I judge you. This is wrong. You're not loving. You should be loving." So I was righteously angry with all of these Westerners, whoever it was that was causing the injustice in the world. And really how was I ever going to bring more love to the planet if all I was putting out was judgement?

Yep. You see it happening all the time. And the terms like "righteous anger," and, as Mary said, "justified violence," are all just justifying unloving behaviour to ourselves and others, and all of them are way away, away from God. A long way away from God.

Now some spirits have motivated some of the questions you asked and I'd just like to address that because some of them have died in what they viewed as justified war. In other words, somebody was going to do something so we have to go and do something to fix that. In God's opinion there's no such thing as justified war - none whatsoever. That's why many of these spirits are in the dark places they are because they are still believing that there is a justification to breaking God's Laws. There is no justification for me to break God's Laws even if all of you do. If every single one here broke God's Laws, and I didn't, there is no justification for me to go ahead and do it because you're doing it. You can even bop me in the nose, kick me in the shins or whatever else you want to do, and I would still not be justified in bopping you back in the nose or kicking you in the shins. [02:04:12.08]

There is no such thing as a justification for violence. By the way, there is a penalty for every act of violence. So you kicking me in the shins has an automatic penalty on your own soul whether you believe it or not, and later on in the future you will find that, and as many of the spirits who are with us today have learnt already, they are now paying the penalty or they are now reaping what they sowed for what they did.

Participant: So as you were saying that I was feeling that if I'm say watching violence in a situation and thinking, "Yeah, that guy really deserved that," then I'm incurring that penalty on my soul at that time?

Yes, not quite as big as the penalty of the person who's actually doing it, but you are agreeing with these actions, so therefore there is something in your soul that is darkening your soul in that process. Now it's not quite as bad as actually acting upon the feeling that you have, actually going out and doing the same as what he'd done, but there is a darkening of the soul through even that thought. And the key is that thought came from some grief and fear inside of your own soul in the first place because you wouldn't have thought that if you didn't have that inside of you at some point. [02:05:32.29]

Mary: So it's really reflecting something.

Participant: I feel that often when I'm feeling something like that it comes from a powerless place within me.

Yep. And there are also all sorts of feelings related to God, such as God's not going to look after me, I've got to look after myself. God's not going to defend me, I've got to defend myself and so forth and when you've worked your way through all of that emotionally, you don't feel the need to defend yourself and you don't feel the need to grab power because of your own powerlessness or anything like that.

7.4. All addictions are unloving

Participant: It seems to me that the acid test is always, is it loving or is it unloving.

The problem with our addictions though is we often think they're loving when they're not.

Participant: That was the message.

It's was like the question that was asked before - what about my loving addictions? There is no such thing.

Participant: Or can we fool ourselves. Do we always know whether something is loving or unloving?

No.

Mary: No. I wanted to talk about my own journey with addiction after the break, but the most humbling part of it has been realising that so much of what I thought was love is actually addiction. And that is something that we really do have to desire and seek truth if we're going to break down addictions because very often in our childhood we were told, "I'm loving you right now" and it wasn't love. It created an addiction and an expectation within us that is now runs most of our relationships with everyone around us. [02:07:18.04]

Well now's probably the best time to break.

Addictions and Bribery, Fear, Threats and Blackmail: Part 2

Mary: I've been standing at the back of the room just trying to feel the room a little bit and I feel like initially there was a feeling of, "Ooh, we're back. It's good, we're all back here together listening. Awesome." A fair bit of fear about the cameras. Everyone was like "Whoa!" for a while. But then near the end of the session I almost felt everyone go back into, "Oh yeah, we know this. It's addictions, it's fear, it's grief. Yep, heard it before. We know what this is all about." Who's feeling that? Honestly? Yep. There are more of you.

You're tired of hearing about fear, addictions. "Get onto another subject."

Mary: "Come on, isn't there a different way to it?!"

8. Mary's personal experiences of working through addictions

Mary: And I just wanted to maybe just relate a little bit of my experience with this and hopefully inspire you a little bit in this process because I feel quite inspired in it at the moment. And that's really an awesome place to be and it is a different way of feeling about this material that I have, it's feeling about it rather than hearing about it, thinking about it, and talking about it, which, a lot of us do when we first come across it, don't we?

Mary: So who remembers the talk I gave probably about 6 months ago about addictions? So way back then I was saying to you guys, "Look, I've had the realisation about addictions. There's fear, there's anger, there's running away, there's shutting down, there's all these things that I've decided I'm not doing anymore. That's what I usually do when my addictions get triggered. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to go instead towards my fear." Who remembers me saying that?

Mary: And then I talked to you about fear and the "Parable of the Green Tree Frog" and how it was all like, "I'm going there, guys, I'm going there," and I have started to go there but what else has happened in that process is I've recognised a whole other level and layer to my addictions and how when I shake up one addiction, if I'm really not serious about this, I'm going to put in another addiction. Or I'm going to kid myself about something else. Now before you all go, "Oh!" It's good! It's good to shake it all up and start to feel a bit off kilter and go, "Well what's really going on here? I was doing that thing, I really wanted all those emotions from men, I want them to make me feel special and important and I'm a capable, worldly woman and when they don't give me that I get really..." [00:03:35.08]

You did that real good! (Laughter)

Mary: That addiction, I did that addiction real good!

Yeah both. The addiction and the impersonation of it. (Laughter)

Mary: Yeah. So I did that one really good and then I shook it up and realised that's really not love that emotion I'm getting from the man, that's what I thought it was, that's what dad taught me when he goes, "Oh you're a good girl. You're someone to be proud of. Don't feel bad about anything at all." That's what I thought love was. And so that was incredibly painful to recognise, "Oh! That's not love," that's what I really want men to give me and it's not love.

Mary: So that's a lot of what it has been about for me in the last 6 months - shaking those things up and then going, "Oh, maybe I'll do something else with men so they'll give me that emotion back. Or maybe I'll act in a different way." And all of it was totally avoiding this true self place that we're talking about.

Mary: The thing I wanted to say to you about it though is that yes, it does hurt. It's going to hurt. It going to hurt breaking these addictions. It's going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel like we're stretching in new different ways because we've been so used to going in this same, "Right, this is how I feel good about myself. This is what I feel love is," and then suddenly it gets shaken up and we feel like we've lost our compass but also that little bits of us that hurt are exposed, hurty bits that we used to cover over with getting all these emotions from people. And it's going to hurt and it has hurt for me quite a lot and I've joked with AJ that I feel like I'm like a crack addict. Can I please just have one good emotion from somebody because it really hurts when I'm not getting it anymore!" (Laughs) That was the addiction.

Mary: I felt like I was in a rehab ward because by my own admission remember I said, "That's it! I'm cutting out these addictions. I'm going for the fears." And then, through a process, I've journalled so much about what were the patterns in my childhood, what were the addictions that were in place, what was going on in my everyday interactions?

Mary: I remember one morning I was down in the eco-tent and I had a massive realisation that AJ's already touched on, and I marched up to the house to tell Dave and Jo because I thought it was Earth shattering. Perhaps it's not but when you get it emotionally it really, really got me. It was the fact that I've touched these emotions in here (true self), and a lot of you have - you've touched the causal grief and pain and the loss in your childhood, the feeling of being unloved, of begin rejected, of being unworthy. I've touched those places. I know that they're there. And I know there's a hell of a lot of it in my case \- there's a big amount.

8.1. Addictions can make us feel good despite our causal pain

Mary: So I was sitting down, feeling about that, feeling like, "I know this is in me, God, I know that there's a whole area of my life that I'm avoiding and that that's the only way I'm going to connect with you if I connect to these things." And then it hit me that if all of that is my true self, all of that is my causal emotion, any time in my life when I'm feeling good, I'm very likely to be in addiction because I just know how much pain is in me.

Addictions can make us feel good despite our causal pain

Mary: And so I went, "Oh man, that means like, I don't know how much of every week, every day, every hour, every minute I'm sitting in addiction. Or I'm sitting in a place of numbing or trying to get an emotion from someone, trying to get an emotion from other people, trying to do something that makes me feel good to avoid what's really there."

Mary: That was pretty humbling and that's a place we all have to go to. We have to go to this place of recognising, "Wow, given what's already in me, and how little I'm feeling that, the majority of the time any time I feel good it's addictive." That changed the way I looked at just about every interaction I had and every minute of my day I went, "Well okay, what am I feeling now? Well is that because I'm connecting to God, because I've released some causal emotion or is it because I'm in an addiction right now?"

8.1.1. An example of addictions of pleasing others

Mary: So that was very empowering. It was painful and confronting but very empowering. And that's what I wanted to say to you about this. Most of my life I've lived in addictions, and I've been very successful in a lot of cases. A lot of people think I'm a very nice person (laughs), or they used to because I did everything to please them. They thought, "Gee that Mary's a lovely girl." And all my addictions were met and I felt great, except I didn't really feel great. I actually carried massive amounts of unworthiness, feeling ugly, feeling like I didn't ever fit in anywhere, all of these things inside of me but I just got really good at living in addiction. And living in these ways to make everyone make me feel okay and then I could avoid that for just another month, or just until I got the other job or whatever it was.

Mary: So that's where I've been living and that's where I've thought, "I feel good. When my addictions are met I'm having a good life, I'm happy," and most of the time I thought I was being loved. All of my friendships with women were based on basically my feelings that I'm totally unacceptable to women and that most women hate me, and it was me avoiding the fear of their anger. And so I did everything to please most of my female friends. They thought I was a great friend and I could get away from that horrible causal emotion that is; that most women don't like me and I'm pretty unlovable around women. So I felt good and I felt loved living in these addictions.

8.2. Addictive happiness is shallow and keeps us away from joy and God

Mary: But all of you know, and most of the reason you're sitting in the chairs you're sitting in, is that it feels shallow after a while, doesn't it? You get to feel like at the end of the day, "Oh I still just really feel not very good about myself and I still feel very disconnected from God, from the people around me in an authentic way."

Mary: So that's where I've lived, feeling good, feeling loved, and basically really unhappy, and the beautiful thing about going through this process is that I've started to face the pain of breaking those "good love feelings," facing the addictions of it. And the beautiful thing that I keep getting to is that what I'm finding are two beautiful three letter words. And that's joy and God.

Breaking our addictions enables us to connect with God and feel joy

Mary: A lot of times it is a very painful feeling - what I really feel about myself and what I really feel inside of me, but the resulting sense that comes over me is not happy, tap dancing, but the closest I can describe to you is joy of feeling that I'm not running at a million miles an hour in the opposite direction of my true emotional state. And there is a beauty in that. There is a real beauty and almost contentment of knowing that I am with the real place, I am with really me.

Mary: The even more stunning and inspiring thing that I'm finding is God and God is helping me to unravel those horrible self concepts that I've kept with me for 32 years, trying all the ways to get away from them. I've carried them like my dirty little secret and the more I'm willing to go into them, to feel them, to allow them to be with me, and talk to God in that place, to ask God to love me in that place (and a lot of you who read my blog know that that's been really hard for me to ask for the love in that place), and I have found a connection to God.

Mary: So I'm telling you, it's so worth it. It's so worth it. It's so worth this uncomfortable feeling. Stepping into the fear feels like you're stepping into this big dark chasm, as many of you know, because we're not taught to have the faith. We're not born with the faith because of the error that we live in, that God is there on the other side of it. But if you can have the courage to step into those fears, and to do those things, joy and God really do exist on the other side. So that's my piece of inspiration before we talk about the nitty gritty. [00:13:04.05]

9. How to identify when we're in addiction

So we've talked a lot about the addictions, and we've talked many other times about addictions. What we want to do is talk to you about what we do with our addictions and what the signs are that we're in addiction. Because even though we've talked about addictions many of you are still in addictions, not realising what the signs are. So what we want to do is talk a bit about what the signs are.

9.1. We first resort to bribery when our addictions are not met

Well remember that our addictions kick off these things called expectations and demands, and of course they're all going out to the environment. And then when the expectations and demands are not met, what do we do? There are usually those three things that we do. We try to bribe our way back into getting them. Now do you understand what I mean by bribing your way back into them? See you go, "If you give me this, I'll give you that." And that's what you'd say is a bribery. So it's like entering into a bartering system about our addictions. But we don't do this from an intellectual level. We don't do it from a state where we're going, "Oh, I'm thinking this and I'm knowing that I'm thinking this." Rather what happens instead is there's the emotional feeling going out of us is, "I want this from you."

We're like a great big radar in our soul around, "Neep, neep, neep, neep. Oh! There's one! There's one! That one will give me my addiction." And many of you are not realising that the whole reason why you're walking up to talk to that particular person is because that's the one that's going to meet your addictions the most in the whole room. That's the reason why you're talking to them many times.

So you walk up to another person and that person's going to meet my addictions next and when they don't, "Hmm, don't know if I like that person very much. That person didn't give me what I wanted." So straight away we have a feeling even, "I don't know if I like them. I don't know if I can get along with them." We have all of these different things that come up because emotionally at the soul level what's going on already is there's a projection coming from us to have an addiction met, and in the reciprocation when the addiction isn't met, I'm going, "Oh hang on a sec I don't know if I like them because they're not doing what I want. They're not meeting my addiction. They're not meeting my demands. They're not responding to my attempts to control." And so what we do is we first attempt the bribe. The bribe is, "I'll give them a bit extra, and we'll see what they do then." That's the bribe. [00:16:03.00]

Mary: And if you think about it most of our relationships are bribe relationships anyway, aren't they?

Yeah.

Mary: I'll do whatever you want as long as you give me the feeling of something else.

Yep. It's always the hook back, the "as long as". As long as you do this, I'll do that. Love doesn't have an "as long as". Love is a gift, remember, I keep saying this to you. Love is a gift. It doesn't have demands and expectations upon the other person. Love in itself demands things of you, it has feelings inside of you that it would demand of you, but it doesn't demand things of others. You don't expect anything from others. You don't want to demand anything from others. And the bribe is one way to know that you're doing it.

9.1.1. An example of not being truthful about being bored in an interaction

Now, the bribe is, I'm sitting down, listening to a discussion of a person that I'm a bit bored with, but I'm sitting there and I don't really want to be in it. How many of you have done this recently? Okay, a lot of you already. There's an addiction in that. Why are you sitting in a conversation that you don't want to be in? You just say to them, "I'm sorry but I don't want to talk to you right now." What will happen if we say that? They'll get all upset and offended and so what's the addiction? We're addicted to not having the other person get upset, offended or angry with us. That's why we don't want to tell them the truth, so what do we do instead? We sit there, going, "Oh, I think I'll just sit here. I'll put up with this. It might stop soon." We're sitting there allowing it and it's the bribe in play.

You're actually doing that because you want to prevent their rage. There's the addiction. Why do we want to prevent a person's rage? We're addicted to doing that often. How many times do you not tell the truth because you're afraid of the person getting angry with you? How many times does that happen? Isn't it half of our life pretty much, isn't it?

So there's the bribe in play. The bribe is, "I'm going to put up with this situation. I'm going to not tell the truth in this situation. I'm going to just sit there and endure it for as long as it takes and hopefully after all of that happens, then they'll say, "Oh they're exhausted now, they don't want to talk anymore," and that's when I'll get up and go." And all the way through that conversation I've spent three hours listening to a conversation I didn't even want to be involved in. That's an addiction. So that's why it's so important to see that. [00:18:33.29]

Mary: The addiction is what we get out of it. The addiction is what I get back from that exchange and many of you get many other things back from just avoiding their anger. Many of you just want the chance for you to say your bit as well. I'll listen to them so then...

So eventually when they exhaust themselves, they'll listen to me. (Laughs)

Mary: Or I can feel like, "A man is talking to me, I'm not interested in what they're saying at all but they're giving me their full attention. That feels pretty good."

It doesn't matter what he's saying, he might be talking about cars. That's fine - I'll listen to that. At least he's giving me the feeling that he's interested in me.

Mary: The yummy feeling I get that makes me feel good or loved or special or nice, that's the addiction.

That's the bribe.

9.2. We secondly resort to threats when our addictions are not met

Sometimes the bribe doesn't work. So what we do is we bribe, bribe and then by the time we start bribing too much we go, "This is costing me too much now." It's a bit like if you had to bribe someone with $100, a lot of you might consider it, but if you have to bribe them with $10,000 then you'd have to think about that one a bit more. And this is what happens to us emotionally. Emotionally we'll give them that bit emotionally but if they want more than that, "No that's enough now. That's enough now. We're not having a part in giving them more than what we've just offered." So we go into another part, and that is the threat. [00:20:05.08]

Now the threat is a purposeful attempt to get the person into their fear and because of their addiction to avoiding that fear, they then act in harmony with what you threaten. That's the purpose of the threat.

Mary: So many times you see this happen if say AJ or myself were in an addictive relationship, bribing, bribing, bribing, bribing, getting lovely feelings back and forth and one person in the relationship says, "I don't want to be a part of this bribery anymore. I'm going to change." If the other person still wants those addictions met, they'll be very tempted to act upon my fear...

9.2.1. An example of threatening to leave a relationship

And threaten. "Well if you're going to do that, I'm leaving." Or, "If you're going to do that, you're going to have to leave." Or, "If you're going to do that, we're going to sell up. You'll have nothing." There are all these different things and oftentimes they are motivated by spirits talking through the person.

Often with a couple you understand each other's fears pretty well, particularly if you've been with each other a few years. You do understand them. So what you finish up doing is you know the fears and bribe works, bribe works, bribe works... all of a sudden bribe doesn't work, and now we're ready to threaten. That's not love but we're ready to do it. We're ready to go ahead into the threat. And to be frank, many of us do that quite readily. And you think how many of you have experienced that from your own families in the last six to twelve months. The threat of, "If you keep going along and listening to this AJ character, that's it. I'm not having anything to do with you anymore." Or, "You'll just see what happens." There are all this threats about what AJ's character might be. They don't even know who I am, but they are threatening you about my character. [00:21:53.23]

And so a lot of times there's threats about what you're doing, where you're going. In a relationship you see this happening quite frequently with regard to a person who gets controlling in the relationship, wanting to know every single moment of the day where their partner is. We were just talking at the break with the guys about you can now get the iPad linked up with the iPhone and know exactly where your partner is at any moment of the day. That's pretty awesome. (Laughter) Pretty controlling, too, isn't it?

Now the threat doesn't necessarily ever get carried out, that's the purpose of a threat. The threat is just there to scare the person enough to move them back into the bribe, to move them back into the addictive interplay. Now the threat often works because it triggers the fear the person doesn't want to feel, and then they want to feel good so instead they go back into their own addiction and give you something so that they are no longer threatened. That's how the threat works.

The threat is a great way of making a person go and do anything without you having to do anything except say something. You don't have to act upon it. It's not like you're going to walk out the door tomorrow. Like, "I'm going to walk out the door tomorrow", but most of the time you're not. But you say it because the threat of it gives the scare. And you'll see this happening in all sorts of relationships. [00:23:29.27]

9.2.2. An example of Mary's previous relationship

Mary: So I think a lot of you who met me a few years ago, when I first met AJ, remember that I was so "in love" in my previous relationship before I met AJ. I mentioned it in one of these talks, that this is the big love that I've been before I met AJ. Well certainly over the course of probably over the last year I've really been deconstructing that relationship, it's a really good way of looking at what a lot of my addictions were, and the lack of love that was actually there.

Mary: So in this relationship some of my true self, some of my causal emotion is the fact that I've always felt very awkward and unattractive and shy around men. For all of my adolescence and most of my twenties I felt very unworthy around men. Very unattractive, I only had two boyfriends and there wasn't a big connection there at all.

Mary: But my last relationship with this man was with a man who a lot of women wanted. He was quite arrogant. A lot of women thought he was a bit of alright. He'd been a big player and he chose me. Wow! So that my addictiveness made me feel like I was really special. I was a special, attractive girl because someone who's a big player chose me. It's very addictive and yucky and I'm still a bit ashamed about it. So I went merrily into addiction in that relationship. I thought it was love because I felt so good. There were so many of my addictions being met, I just thought it was love.

Mary: He, on the other hand probably didn't think it was love, but anyway, in the course of the relationship it turned out that I was the worker. I did all of the work. We lived in another country and I paid all of the bills. And he eventually got a job and said, "Oh look I'll start paying for some things and I want to get a mobile phone and I'll pay for the mobile phone." After six months that just wasn't happening. I was just paying for everything all of the time.

As well as the mobile phone.

Mary: As well as the mobile phone! Yep. Additional expense. And one evening I just brought up, "Look, are you going to pay for the mobile phone from your work?" That was it. Immediately he was very upset and he gave me a long lecture about how if we were really together and if it was really our money, I would never raise an issue like that. And he really thought maybe we should consider whether we should still be in a relationship or not. Threat. Threat to my true self emotions which are, "I feel horribly unattractive and all men are going to reject me."

Mary: I didn't want to feel that at all so I went straight back to addiction, back into the bribe and went, "Look don't worry, you're right, I'm wrong. It is about us in it together and it's about money. I'm messed up about money." I blamed myself, allowed the bribery to continue. So that's a pretty striking example but it's one that I skipped over. I didn't see that till much after the relationship had ended and most of our relationships are littered with this kind of bribery. Sometimes it's a little more subtle than that. That was fairly extreme. [00:27:08.16]

9.3. We thirdly resort to blackmail when our addictions are not

Are there any questions about threat? The third one is the next extreme from the threat. You see the threat only works if you're prepared to act upon your threat. So what happens is we often make the threat but then because nothing's happening, nothing's changing, we then have to revert to actually acting upon the threat, and that's where the blackmail begins, and that's pretty extreme now. We're now prepared to put this threat into action and actually we're now blackmailing the person through the action of the threat. We're now blackmailing the person into conforming to what we want them to do.

In other words, we have no respect for their free will; we have no respect for love in that place and now what we're doing is we're just basically pushing them around. And we're only doing it because we want to avoid some of our own emotions. That's the only reason why we are doing it. And in particular we want to avoid being loving because the loving thing to do would be to do none of those things actually; to not bribe them, not threaten them and not blackmail them but rather just let them make their own choices and decisions. That's the loving thing to do. You're also allowed to make you're own choices and decisions but your choices and decisions are completely independent to anybody else's choices and decisions. So you can choose to leave if that's what you wish to do, but don't make it dependent upon something they do, because that's now a blackmail situation. For example I wouldn't leave Mary unless I decided I wanted to leave Mary. Not because of anything Mary's doing. It will be because of my decision of what I feel is good for me. Are there any questions?

10. Audience questions

10.1. It is possible to falsely perceive that others are using bribery, threats and blackmail

Participant: Could any of these things look like bribery, look like a threat or look like blackmail but you're really just behaving in your own self love but the other person through their errors sees it as bribery or as a threat or as blackmail?

Certainly, Graham, that is very true. See a person who is fully connected to themselves would do exactly what they desire to do every single point in time. Now once we get closer and closer to God that will be more and more harmonious with love every time. So once you become at-one with God, you will do exactly what you desire to do in harmony with love at every moment. Now that means that you no longer respond to the bribes, threats or blackmail from others.

Now people are so used to doing those things that they actually believe you should do whatever their bribery and threat or their demands and expectations demand. And so often they then interpret what you're doing as being threatening or blackmailing but you feel calm you're just making a decision and choice for your own life. And yes a lot of times you are accused of it and none of us want to be accused of this, and that's one of our addictions.

We don't want to be accused of bribing or being threatening or blackmailing or being unloving - woe betide us if we're accused of unloving behaviour. So if somebody just accuses you of unloving behaviour that in fact could be their blackmail on you: "You're being unloving now." Like, hang on a sec, all I did was I just wanted to make a choice and decision based upon my own desires. They're all harmonious with God's Love, how can I be unloving? I want to do this. I'm allowed to do that.

I've had that happen a lot in the last few months with setting up this God's Way of Love organisation where people are accusing me of all sorts of things about my motives and my desires and everything, about how I want to control people and all these other things. No, I just want to set up this! I just want to do that because that's my passion. That's the only thing that I'm doing it for. And all of these other accusations are just their own opinions and their own reading into the lines of it all. [00:31:40.29]

Mary: And it can in fact be their attempts at blackmail, can't it?

Yeah, their attempts of blackmailing others. They don't agree with it, so they then go down the track of saying there's ulterior motives or whatever. You think about your own motives in life, you're not conscious necessarily of ulterior motives most of your life, are you? Most of your life you're attempting to do things to a loving degree to a certain extent. It's not like you're sitting there planning, "How can I destroy such-and-such's life?" There's very few of us on Earth actually doing that. Sometimes governments can contemplate going to war with another country; that is definitely a contemplation of the destruction of their life. But in our day-to-day life we're not usually in a place where we're contemplating the destruction of other people's lives. We're often just wanting to go ahead with what we desire to do.

And sometimes other people accuse us of all sorts of things that we don't have any feeling for or feelings inside of us about. So just because somebody says you're bribing me, it doesn't mean you are. And just because somebody says, "You're threatening me now," that doesn't mean you are. But what I'm talking about is my own emotions here.

10.1.1. Focusing on our own emotions when falsely accused

Remember this is about your personal relationship with God and every time you point the finger and say, "Oh but they're accusing me of bribing them and I'm not," every time you point the finger away from yourself, you're also not dealing with something inside of yourself. The question that I would be asking myself is, "Okay I'm getting accused of threatening people. Alright, am I really threatening people? What's my Law of Attraction here? What is happening inside of me? Do I feel bad about telling people the truth? Or what is it?" There's some kind of Law of Attraction involved with the accusation, so feel that.

You see I can't control Mary's desire to connect to God. I can't control Mary's desire even to connect to me, let alone connect to God. I can't even control Mary's desire to connect to herself, so that she can be connected to God or myself. I can't control any of those things. The only thing I can do is deal with my own emotions that prevent me from connecting to God, deal with my own emotions that prevent me from connecting with myself, and my own emotions that prevent me from connecting to Mary. I can't do anything about Mary's. At all. All I need to do is my own.

And every time we take the focus away from ourselves in terms of, "Alright, what's my issue here?" and we put the focus back on the other person in any relationship, "What's their issue here?" we're taking away our power to change our life every time we do that.

So we need to give up analysing what their motives are. A lot of times people have all sorts of motives towards myself. I've given up trying to analyse what their motives are, I just feel my feelings about what they've done. That's all. If you analyse their motives, if you analyse their feeling, you take away your power to change what's going on because the only thing you can change is your own soul. You can't change them. You try changing them - try it for a week or a month. See how long the relationship lasts when you try to change somebody. It doesn't last very long generally unless they have an addiction to that. [00:35:09.25]

So yes, so the answer is yes, Graham, people can accuse you of those things, it doesn't mean you're doing them but you need to look at yourself still because they'll be other things in play.

10.2. Becoming aware of control and addictions in society

Participant: This is about expectation and demands. When society puts on expectations and mannerisms, protocols, and ethical ways of doing things, they're controlling us as a cultural thing.

Definitely.

Participant: But who is controlling whom? Are we controlling each other? Is that we're doing?

Well most societal demands are about group control, are they not? Like a group of people want to control the individual and a lot of things that happen in companies are the same; a group of people control an individual and so forth. And we've got to make the choice; do we want to be involved in that? And now my feelings are well if it's unloving, then I don't probably want to be involved in it. But if I feel it's loving, then I'll be involved if I want to be.

So you don't have to worry so much about what do I do in this circumstance or what do I do in that circumstance? Because when you feel love inside of yourself, you automatically know what the loving thing to do is in the circumstance that's there. You don't have to think about it, it's just an automatic reaction. If it's not an automatic reaction, then it means there is fear involved, there are some emotions involved and possibly some addictions involved.

Love should be, in fact the way God created you is that love is an automatic response as long as you have released your grief and your fear and your addictions. So you have all the prospect of getting into a state of at-onement with God where you no longer have any addictions driving anything you do, at all. No addictions and you'll know automatically when somebody's attempting to control you emotionally. You just know it automatically. You can feel it coming from them as a feeling.

So they can be saying nice smooth words, "Oh you're such a lovely person, I love talking to you," and at exactly the same time coming out of their soul is, "I'm really needing you to give me approval right now". So in other words they're saying the words of love but not feeling the feelings of it. And you'll get to a point in your own development where you can feel that going on, where you can feel, "You're saying all these words but I'm not feeling anything." Give me the feelings. The feelings are the real thing. [00:37:56.16]

10.2.1. Our addictions prevent us from being sensitive to others' emotions

Mary: I feel like the thing that stops us sensing that the most is our own addictions.

Yeah. When we're in addictions we cannot feel, to be frank; we're feeling ourselves mostly and mostly we're feeling our avoidances. We're attempting to deny our own fears when we're in our addictions and in that place it's very, very hard for you to feel any single person around you and what their motivation is, what drives them, what kind of emotions they have towards you.

When you release those addictions and those fears, you'll find it's like a barrage of information coming into you constantly. This constant barrage of information of, "What is that person feeling." Every time you come up to talk with me after the group or whatever I can feel the underlying emotional reason why you're present there. Now it's not because I'm special, it's because I've let go of a lot of my addictions, not all of them because I've still got some, because if I didn't have, I'd be at-one with God now. But I've let go of so much of my addictions now where I can feel what's coming from you.

And you can do exactly the same thing. You'll feel what's coming from others. Not through your addictions because it's impossible to do so, not through your fears, but you'll feel their real emotion and you'll be able to love in that process. So you feel a demand coming from them, and you will still be able to love them even though the demand is unloving coming to you. And you'll still be able to love them. It doesn't mean you'll do what they want. You'll just love them still. You won't feel angry and upset and vicious or resentful of them. [00:39:42.05]

10.3. Giving up addictions and getting into fear and grief

Participant: So talking about bribery, threats and blackmail, I feel that's been going on between Justin and I, the emotional bribery, and I've been out of the house now for two weeks or something and I have threatened to leave. But now that I have left... like I've done all that stuff that you've written on the board but it still feels crap. Like I don't really know what I'm trying to say.

Can I help you with why it feels crap? Because we're often in this place where we're between the addictions and the fears but we're not yet allowing ourselves to actually go to the causal emotion. You're in that state where you're still cycling between the fears and the addictions, and yet not feeling the grief of why this is happening or what's really going on. In your case it's related to how your father has treated you in your childhood and not feeling that emotion. In Justin's case it's related to how both of his parents have treated him in his childhood and he's not feeling that emotion.

And while you're not feeling that and in this fear-based place, it's a terrible place. It's where you have all this inner turmoil, you feel uncertain about your life. You don't want to act. You feel like there's this terrible feeling constantly going on, turmoil inside of you. You feel afraid. In between afraid and then wanting to get the addiction met and trying to numb it out. And you go through this cycle until you allow yourself to just feel the grief. And oftentimes the grief can happen within a day or two days and bang it's gone. We don't let ourselves go there and so what we feel is this pain of staying in addictions and fear, because we're now conscious, we've now had an awakening that that's where we are, but we're unwilling yet to go to the actual grief-based emotion.

10.3.1. With God's help it's possible to release addictions in very short periods of time

So the key is to pray about getting and dealing with the fears that prevent you from dealing with the grief-based emotion. When you deal with the grief-based emotion the entire thing can disappear within days. Hours, sometimes for what you think is this terrible big thing that's guided your entire life. Remember when you're prepared to feel this God's Love enters you in this place. And so quite often sometimes the things you're terrified of, that you've spent years and years of your life denying and trying to run away from and getting your addictions met about, within half an hour, an hour, two hours of crying, the whole thing can be gone because as you're doing that God's Love is entering you and helping erase the causal error. But God's Love can't do its work while we are not connected with our true self. [00:42:51.13]

Participant: I guess just one of my blocks is that I feel like it's so huge and like I don't even want to go there anyway.

Yep. And the belief that it's so huge is in a way it's almost a lack of faith in God. What we're saying to God is, "Look, my problems are so big that no matter how much power you have, you can't solve my problem." That's really what we're saying to God. We're telling God that He does not have the power to actually help us get through this emotion. And if you can see that, that's a major causal emotion in itself. We've got this belief going on in our mind and also probably in our feelings that God can't help us deal with things and yet God created our very being. How can it be that God can't help us?

And so what we finish up doing is we finish up going into this place where we're so fearful of our true self and yet once we get there with God, it can go so quickly that two weeks later, we think, "Why was that such a bad problem?"

10.3.2. Separating our emotions about our parents from our beliefs about God

Participant: And so with the belief that God can't help me, like I view God as male at this present moment. Does that mean that it's related to my stuff with Dad too?

Yeah so you could say the blockage toward God is, "Dad is God".

Many of us have some pretty basic things going on at our soul level. What happens when we're very, very young, we grow up starting to think that mum and dad are the gods of our universe. They are the ones that I've got to do everything for. They are the ones with the rules. If I break those rules I get punished. And so they are the ones that we see as God.

So what we do is we project the stuff that we feel with dad towards God. Now God is not your dad. God is much better than your dad is ever capable of becoming even because God has this infinite amount of Love prepared for you to receive. Your dad is going to be dependent on that love just as you are. So God has this huge ability to love - an infinite ability to love. Your dad will never have that. So he can never be God and he will never be as good as God. And yet one of our false beliefs is that God is like our parents are. God is like our religion has told us God is. God is like the punishing, demanding, unjust God that we believe God to be. And God's none of those things.

And that's where a lot of our unwillingness to get to our emotion begins. Because we don't feel God cares enough to even help us with our emotion. [00:45:43.02]

Participant: Yeah that's what I feel and like God's not really there because I felt my dad wasn't really there.

Exactly. Yeah. So what we need to do, and this is something that everyone needs to learn to do eventually, is separate what your mother did and what your father did from what God does. We constantly project what happens in our family towards God as if God is that person doing those things. God's nothing like your mother, nothing like your father, at all, and we need to let go of that belief.

Mary: Can I relate that what you're feeling, Arvana; that's what I was trying to say when it hurts. It hurts because we're trying to break free of these addictions, and we're stepping into the fears and we're not quite there yet. When we get there ironically the pain doesn't feel as torturous. It feels relieving. So stay the course, you know, and remind yourselves of truth.

Just remind yourself why you're in fear and addiction. The reason why you're here is because you believe things about your real self that are untrue. Once you believe the truth about these things, it'll all flow from you quite easily. That's one of the biggest issues that most people face I feel, is they have this belief that their own emotions are so big that even God is not going to be able to help them through them.

In the end we have very little faith in God, hey? That's why I talked about, "Faith the size of a mustard seed could move a mountain." If we had that kind of faith then we can move mountains. That's how much faith most of us have. I don't see many of us moving mountains yet. So that's how much faith we yet have in God. And yet we need to develop that faith in God. God is far greater and better than anything you can imagine at the moment. And even once you become at-one with God, and once you continue to progress and become at one with your soulmate, God is still going to be greater than anything you can imagine. [00:48:00.03]

10.4. We need to release emotions to view our parents and God differently

Participant: I've got a lot of dad issues and you're saying we have to separate God from dad?

Yeah.

Participant: I truly believe in my heart and I feel that I do separate God from my dad, but is it possible to get there without doing major processing?

No, it isn't possible. You need to do some major processing. Because the truth is that the emotion about masculinity remains in you until you release and forgive your dad. Until there's full forgiveness of your earthly dad, the emotions about men are going to remain present within you and the masculine side of God is going to receive those projections from you.

It's the same if you have a whole group of emotions about women from your mum, or from relationships that have happened during your life. Those emotions about women will be projected upon the feminine side of God, and so it's impossible to actually have a complete relationship with God until those emotions are dealt with. However, we can at least intellectually understand that God is not my dad. God is not my mum. We can at least have some trust that God is far better than anything we've ever experienced. We can at least trust that. [00:49:26.15]

Participant: So you can be projecting dad stuff onto God without even realising it.

You are projecting dad stuff on God until all of your male stuff is released.

Participant: Even without realising it.

Without realising it, yes.

Mary: Well you're projecting your dad stuff onto every male, and part of God is masculine. This is why we stress the importance of the emotional work with your childhood so much because until we clear those really basic core injuries with masculinity and femininity, that is imposed on every man and woman, and the masculine and feminine elements of God automatically.

Of course God doesn't hurt about them because She/He doesn't have any emotional injuries like other people on Earth do. God is infinitely loving and so God just says, "There she goes again projecting her beliefs from her dad on me. What can I do to help her through that process?" [00:50:34.06]

Mary: And it doesn't mean you can't have a relationship with God while you have injuries, but it will never be complete while that's still in you.

Participant: So those feelings of immense love and gratitude that I feel towards God, that is authentic? That can still be very real even though there's this projection that I'm unaware of.

Your true self has authentic feelings of love and things towards God but your true self also still has some fears about God, and still has some addictions with God.

Participant: It was pointed out to me by a friend recently that I know I have blocks with processing things and I get really frustrated with those blocks, but it was pointed out perhaps I'm angry with God. And that was such a foreign concept, even to have that concept that I could be. I'm thinking, "No, I don't have any feelings of anger towards God," but then we did dissect it and discuss it as far as the dad thing and the male and I see God as male. And I just thought, "I don't even know how to be angry with God. I don't feel worthy to be angry with God."

Probably the first question to ask is why you're so afraid of being angry with God. Oftentimes we have all these religious beliefs associated with if I get angry with God, then God's going to somehow punish me, or I'll have a bad day tomorrow.

Participant: I'm not aware of feeling that.

You're not aware of feeling it, but that doesn't mean the feelings aren't present within you. You'll discover them if you go through the process.

Participant: Yes. Thank you.

Mary: Can you see as well that when we resist God's process there is often an anger in that state?

Participant: Maybe I just believe I'm not allowed to get angry - I'll get in to trouble by dad.

For most of you, if you ever got angry with your dad, what did you get? (AJ motions a smack) That doesn't help you to get angry again with a man, does it? So what do you use instead? A bit of cajoling here, a bit of bribery there. [00:52:46.07]

Mary: A bit of threat, blackmail.

To avoid the rageful response.

10.5. Difficulties in romantic relationships stem from parent-based injuries

Participant: Hi, AJ. Hi, Mary. Nice to see you guys. This may have been covered earlier but I just wondered, I see a lot of people with really beautiful functioning friendships in their life, where they don't tend to rely on bribery and threat and blackmail and there's a lot of openness and authenticity and calling each other on emotions, coming from a really good space. I just wondered if you could maybe share a bit about why do people find it so much harder in romantic or family relationships to have the same equanimity?

If you think about it, you'll see the answer is really as plain as the nose on your face, as the saying goes. Once we enter relationships that are to do with love relationships with a partner, immediately the mother and father injuries kick into play. And that's why most people have difficulty in their relationships, because that's where most of the addictions come from, the mother and father-based injuries.

Mary: And the biggest fears of feeling our true self, of feeling the pain in our childhood. That's where our damaged self concept came from, our childhood, and so when we enter a relationship that means a lot to us, often we have a lot of addiction, but our fear is heightened of feeling these things.

Yeah, so for that reason it's automatic almost as soon as we enter a relationship that the relationship will begin triggering our emotional addictions, and if the addictions don't get met, then our fears start getting exposed. Most of us are very anti our fears being exposed and so we get into anger instead and before you know it, the relationship's having problems.

10.5.1. Friendships are often based around addictions

Participant: So is it a dynamic because there's most to be gained and therefore more to be feared to be lost?

Yes it's not only that but there's also the fact that when we're with our friendships, our addictions are often automatically in play. That's why we feel so good about them.

So for example, if you've been treated badly by your father you'll do one of two things. You'll either attract men into your life who are not like your father, who are totally the opposite to your father, or you'll attract men into your life who are the same as your father. Now it's more highly likely to attract men into your life that are opposite your father. The reason why is because you take one look at the man who's like your father and if you didn't like your father, you go, "I don't like him!" And so you don't spend time with him.

Whereas if there's another man who's totally the opposite of your father, you've still got the unhealed emotion within yourself but there's a man there, he's totally the opposite. He's really gentle and kind with women. He does whatever women want. That's totally the opposite of what my father was. "I really like him, he's so nice," not realising that my addiction is still in play because I've yet to deal with the emotion with my father. And that's what I'm staying away from by actually entering this addictive relationship with that man. He's the opposite of my dad so he's going to give me the things daddy never gave me.

10.5.2. Addictions relationships create intense attraction followed by lessened attraction

So a lot of the so called friendships even are also about the addictions getting met but they're not as much in play, as you say, because usually with the relationship we have a lot more at stake. We generally want a long term, close relationship. Where it comes from is that every single one of us inside of our soul has a soulmate desire somewhere. And that's a desire to connect to one other person in this universe, which is the other half of themselves. Every single person has that underlying desire within them. And because of that, as soon as a partnership begins, any emotional damage or injury blocking that relationship begins to be triggered, and most people can't bear the results of it because it sends them into grief. And instead of feeling their grief, and their fear, they want the addiction met. And as soon as that happens then you get anger, fighting, resentment, bickering and eventually it gets so bad that there's no attraction left, so they leave.

So the average cycle on the planet with a relationship is, initial intense attraction, a period of time where the intense attraction might remain. Then the addictions start coming into play. The fears start getting triggered and so forth, and then the attraction starts waning and it gets to a point where they're arguing, fighting, and they just want to leave each other, so they leave. [00:57:38.17]

Now that relationship cycle happens to many people in their life. If you look past in your own life, many of you have had that relationship cycle happen even if you've been married for fifty years, you might be in the last phase of that cycle. So where there's no passion left, there's no desire left, you're getting along but not really, and there's no passionate sexual desire for each other. And all of that happens because the addictions are now almost fully in play and we're just unwilling to address them. We're unwilling to go to their real emotional cause.

Mary: The basis of most intense attraction in my life, would you not say, has been addiction. So nowhere in that whole natural common relationship cycle was there any pure love.

Yeah. A lot of people they just say, "I just saw them across the room", and this is the romanticised view we have of soulmates. We have this romanticised view that somehow you automatically knew them. Well to a degree that might be true but let's face it, most of us have got fears and addictions around our true self. How do we even recognise them while they're all in play? We can't! So when we have that initial instant attraction going on with a person, we've got to be very careful because in that particular place there's probably highly likely that that person is like tailor made to fit every one of my addictions. Go ahead, if you want, with the relationship, but be aware that actually this is going to be a relationship that's going to help me trigger and work my way through a lot of those addictions. [00:59:24.10]

Mary: The truth is when we're both our true selves without the fears and addictions we will recognise our soulmate immediately because obviously we're going to be so much like each other. We'll have so much of the same passion; we're just going to naturally gravitate towards each other.

That's only after the fears and addictions... Like if you asked Mary three years ago whether she was attracted to me, what was the answer then, babe?

Mary: (Laughs) Who were we talking to in the break? Liam? He was at the first meeting where we met. He was like, "It ended pretty badly, didn't it?"

Right, because it triggers so many different things.

Mary: And a lot of you give me a hard time, hey, going, "You're with this amazing guy and you kept rejecting him, and you were angry and whatever." None of my addictions were being met. Nothing! No addiction! No addiction! No make me feel good. No help me avoid the causal self. That's why it was so rocky.

And you wait till you have someone where nobody meets your addictions and see how you feel! It doesn't feel good.

Mary: It didn't matter that I was being loved. Because I didn't recognise it as love. This is the point about addictions. I didn't recognise love. Now I'm so humbled by the fact that I'm starting to, and to receive such a gift. But in the beginning addictions are what I knew as love and he wasn't giving me any of them and I really felt very afraid, and because I didn't want to feel it I got angry.

And so a lot of times we come into relationships saying, "Love is the guy or girl who's going to meet my addictions. That's love." That's what we believe love to be. And when they don't, we go, "Whoa, they don't love me very much," and they might be loving you by telling you the truth about yourself and yet you're rejecting that. [01:01:16.13]

10.6. Emotional injuries towards men are imparted from both parents

Participant: Hey you guys. I have a bit of confusion about what you were talking about earlier about, where if your dad's a certain way you're either going to end up with someone who's like your dad or the opposite. I found that my mum ended up with the opposite of her dad and when I get triggered by men, often I think of my grandfather because my dad seems to be quite introverted in certain ways, which doesn't really make sense anyway. The question is, is it possible that some of the injuries in me about men are about my grandfather? Like as a separate?

Highly possible because you receive injuries from both parents.

Participant: I saw him often as well.

So your mother's beliefs about men, where did they come from?

Participant: Yeah, from her dad.

They come from her interaction with her father.

Participant: Yeah because I've been trying to relate everything back to my dad but I just think of my grandfather often. Like the anger that I've got towards men, I just think of him and how mum feels.

And that's how your mum feels about men.

Participant: So it's not necessarily about my dad. I mean there are certain things that I think are my dad.

Mary: Remember it's your whole environment that affects your injuries, your self concept as you're growing up. And for each of us, the majority of my injuries with men are going to be from my dad and from how my mum feels about men. The majority of my injuries with women or with myself are going to be from how my dad feels about women, or how my mum feels about herself.

10.7. Focusing on unloving emotions rather than causal emotions

Participant: Hi. I've recently realised that one of the emotions about anger towards men is coming from not so much my childhood but my teenage-hood, having a step father and having a father figure for the first time in my life, or second time in my life. And I'm just wondering whether that's causal stuff because if it is then I've got a whole issue to deal with that I'm just avoiding at the moment. [01:03:58.15]

Why do you we keep asking the question, "Is this causal?"

Participant: Because I've got this impression that it's all got to be about the childhood not when you're actually have your free will.

No, it's all about the unloving emotions.

Participant: Okay.

Whenever there's an unloving emotion within yourself, there's a causal emotion to deal with. It's quite that simple. Most of your unloving emotions are going to come from your childhood. Some will come from your teenage life, some will come through your relationships, and some will come from old age and all your resentment about that. There are all sorts of different emotions that are based around unloving principles. We need to focus on the unloving thing first. So if we feel a feeling that we know is unloving, there's definitely some emotions to deal with in there.

Participant: And it doesn't matter, as long as you're feeling that there's a shift emotionally within you when you're actually processing that emotion, it doesn't matter what memories it triggers? Because to me it always comes back to a memory, and then I feel like, "Well, this can't be it because this happened recently, so how can that be a causal emotion?"

Well there'll always be a relationship between what you're releasing and all the different events in your life. Sometimes there'll be 50 different events all related to the one same emotional injury. [01:05:10.02]

Participant: And that feels a lot like that too.

Mary: I feel like a lot of people's questioning about, "Is it causal?" is based around our fear and dread of emotions.

Most of it is addictions actually.

Mary: "Am I going to have to feel all of that?" And we want reassurance that we're not going to have to feel that or we're doing it right or whatever.

And that's an addiction. Wanting reassurance is an addiction.

Mary: Yeah.

So if I go to Mary, "Tell me, tell me it's all okay. Tell me it is okay." What does that feel like to you? Does that feel needy? Isn't that an addiction? "Tell me I'm okay. Tell me I'm okay." If I don't already know I'm okay then I obviously don't feel I'm okay, so I need to just feel I'm not okay. It's actually a lot simpler than many of you are making it!

Mary: And what I remember is that God designed this process and designed me. So I'm going to be okay as long as I trust it and step into it, as long as I stay out of addiction and am humble about my fears and my causal emotions. When we're not afraid of our emotion, we won't go, "Oh, should I feel this one? Or is this like an effect? Or is the causal?" We'll just feel. We'll just feel because we know it's a beautiful quality of our soul to feel and we will trust that our feelings will lead us to a causal place.

Mary: The reason so many of us get stuck in our effect emotions is because we live in addiction. We don't want to face the fear, and we don't want to go to our true self. If we can work on those fears, then the minute we start feeling, even if it's an effect, we will be guided beautifully by our soul through our longing to God to take us to our deepest place, and it will be gone from us.

11. Spirit interactions with addictions

What we'd like to do now though is shift into this zone of how the spirits interact with these addictions.

11.1. Our expectations and demands constantly emanate from us into the universe

So you imagine you're sitting there, and you've got all of these addictions in play. They're all emotions that you're trying to avoid, fears you're trying to avoid which you've now turned into things that you want from other people. Expectations, what we expect from others, and what we demand from others is now being projected out of ourselves emotionally. It's coming out of our soul whether we like to believe it is or not. There are just all these demands, all these expectations coming out of our soul. It's like an antenna radiating out all of its stuff. [01:07:43.28]

So at the moment, we can pick up a signal here from Brisbane, a television station. That's because of the radiation that we receive. We're receiving a radiated signal and I'm feeling it. I can actually feel it. Your body can feel it, but we need sensitive, electronic equipment that tunes into it. It oscillates and tunes into it, and then we get the frequency of that particular oscillation and we start receiving all of that information. Well that is exactly the same as what happens to our soul. It's exactly the same process. We have radiating it out of our soul, like a transmitter. All of our addictions, all of our expectations, all of our demands coming out of us. And so does our neighbour, our next door neighbour or our friendly...

Mary: Sister in law.

And so does our partner. They've all got the same thing radiating out of them. Same kind of thing. All of their addictions and expectations radiating automatically. And then we have a heap of spirits in the spirit world, who many times don't want to be there, because where they are is in quite a dark place, and they also can feel this radiated signal coming out of us, which all of these addictions, and which are very jagged in their formation coming out of us, to the universe; in fact, everywhere.

Our expectation and demands (wavy lines) emanate from us and attract spirits

11.2. Spirits hook into co-dependent addictions with us

So what are the spirits going to do? It's pretty logical, isn't it? You're going to feel which demand you would like to pander to, just so long as one of my demands gets met. So if I'm a spirit and I go around and I'm zoning around and I can feel them, "Oh, Raj! He wants to feel good from women." And if I'm a woman, I zone into Raj and go, "I'll make him feel good. I'll give him a few nice feelings from the spirit world for Raj, but I want to feel good as a woman from Raj. So as long as Raj is willing to give me that emotion, and enter into that addiction, I'm happy to enter this relationship." And we might become so bound together that I follow Raj around for the rest of his life, giving him those emotions, and he gives me those emotions. He's never able to fully enter into a relationship with his soulmate because he's already sharing some of his emotions with other women around the place and particularly with me in the spirit world, assuming that I'm a woman in this example, and so he's automatically in this addictive relationship with me and I'm in this addiction with him.

Mary: How many of you have uncovered this kind of interaction in your processing?

How many of you have noticed that you're heavily in addiction with spirits at different times? Yeah. A lot. It's a major problem on the Earth. [01:10:56.23]

11.3. Spirits use bribery, threats and blackmail to maintain addictive relationships with us

11.3.1. An example of Mary's co-dependent addiction with male spirits

Mary: And this was something that was very humbling for me to go through because I had my big declaration: "That's it for me and addictions, I'm really stepping into this," and I cut out a lot of my addictions here in the physical in relationships and I had to come to realise that because I didn't really want it yet, I attracted a whole group of spirits that started to give me those feelings. That started to make me feel like, "No, you're a good girl to be proud of. You're alright." And it was very subtle and it took me a process of praying and feeling about it, and channelling about it, to recognise what was actually going on; how much I had actually attracted a whole group of other spirits that were actually wanting energy from me as they do, and that's the bribery, to occur.

Mary: What happened then was I went, "I don't want this anymore. It's actually damaging." It was a whole group of men who were coming along, projecting lots of emotions like my dad used to project, "Don't you feel bad about yourself, you're a good girl," some of the stuff I said earlier, but they were actually subtly wanting to have the sexual relationship with me basically. So I wasn't having any experiences of it or anything like that, but there was an energetic pull at me that I should be interested in them. And it was definitely a block between us.

Mary: So I identified the bribery. I could feel it going on, I immediately felt disgusting, yucky, "Right, I don't want this anymore." So I channelled, I spoke to them, I went through a process of a few days of really becoming very sensitive to when they were present and when there were gone, and so I sensitised to that because before I wasn't. I didn't want to feel it or see it, but once I sensitised to it, I started to break the addictions.

Mary: What happened next was a whole bunch of threats from the spirit world. They started projecting at me and really it became blackmail very quickly, projecting at me exactly the reverse emotions. So before they were helping me avoid a lot of emotions. Remember my true causal self is, "Men don't like me, I'm yucky sexually, I'm unattractive," all of these things that I was carrying around, and they were helping me avoid. They were saying, "You're a good girl, you're lovely. You're someone to be proud of." As soon as I decided I want to quit the bribery, they started to project at me exactly the opposite thing. "You're disgusting, you're horrible. Who would want you anyway?" All of this sort of stuff all in an attempt to get me back in relationship with them.

Spirits in co-dependent actions with us use bribery, threats and blackmail to maintain those relationships

It's quite obvious when they start doing that. With bribery, they're trying to make your life good, so that you feel good and then once you feel good, you'll stay in this addiction or bribery with them. As soon as you get out of that, now they start projecting at you exactly the opposite. They start attacking you and that doesn't feel very good, does it? That feels pretty bad. And so why are they attacking you? Because they want to get you back into this place that you were before. So their attack intensifies. And then once the threats don't work, then they actually try to carry out what they were threatening.

11.3.2. An example of spirits encouraging people on Earth to rape and murder

So I've had spirits come to me saying, "We're going to kill you. We're going to do all of this stuff to you," and so forth. And then they attempt to carry that out through a person. I have people coming up to me, "Oh, I was told by some spirits that I should kill you actually." And we're sitting there talking, and they're saying it like it's like it's nothing and I'm going, "Wow, like, yeah, I can feel who's with you who want to do that." But what the person themselves could have easily followed through on that decision. And in fact historically many people do.

What do you think happens to most of these murdering rapists who get the death penalty? They pass into the spirit world as a murdering rapist. What do you think they want to do still? Murder and rape. How do you think they're going to do that? By connecting with a person on Earth who's willing to do it for them. And they do. And that's why a lot of the people on Earth go, "I can't remember what happened," because a lot of the times they weren't even present when it was happening because they'd gone out of body, and the spirit had come in and away they go, doing their rampage until it stops, until the spirit can no longer maintain the control.

11.3.3. An example of being open to hearing truth

So the spirits can carry out very negative things on us if we are open to the addiction. If we're not open to the addiction, it's totally impossible for a spirit or anyone else, alive or dead, to affect us. And this is something we need to come to appreciate - the only reason why spirits affect us the way they do is because we're still in addiction with them. So whenever you notice the spirits around affecting you a certain way, understand there's the addiction. Many of you go very tired when you hear some truth. There's an addiction there to avoid truth. The spirits just come along and say, "Oh, you don't want to hear this. Turn off."

I've seen some people turn off in a talk instantaneously when I'm speaking with them. Some of them have even asked the question and two minutes after they've asked the question they've gone to sleep. And I know sometimes I might be a bit boring and long winded but honestly, to do that two minutes after you've asked the question, there's something else going on. And a lot of times it's these spirit interplays with the addictions involved where, "I don't want to hear truth, I don't want to hear the truth". Somebody says the truth, I'm out to it; already.

How many of you have had that trouble listening to the DVDs sometimes, where you know, "I've got to listen to this. I've got to listen to this." You sit down, force yourself to listen and you're off. "I've got to listen to this again. I've got to listen to this." Sit down, force yourself to listen and you're off again. It's like it's never ending. And you think, "Gee, AJ must be a boring speaker for this to happen all the time." But it's actually a lot of the times truth that you need to hear that spirits don't want you to hear. It's quite simple. And you're hooking into that addiction because you don't want to feel the causal emotion. [01:17:32.17]

11.3.4. Breaking the addiction with spirits by feeling our true self

Mary: And that's what I was going to say, that they go for bribery, threats, blackmail and the only way out of that cycle is to feel your true self. And ironically they helped me. They were projecting at me all the things that I was resisting feeling. As soon as I submitted to that and released that, I was clearer as a soul and they couldn't influence me anymore because I wasn't afraid to feel those feelings. They're always acting on the fear of the feeling.

11.3.5. An example of mishearing what AJ says

Participant: I actually had that experience when you come to Coffs Harbour one time and I asked you a question and the answer I remembered you giving me was completely different to the answer you gave and when I heard the tape a few weeks later I just went, "Wow I know what just happened there."

Yeah. I've had people purposefully tape my discussions with them because prior to them taping my discussions they often went away thinking I said exactly the opposite to what I said. And I've actually given them a recording that I've made of the discussion, given it to them, and they go, "Wow, I didn't even remember that discussion." And yet that was the discussion we had. And this happens all the time and the reason why it happens is because we have so much influence going on around us because we are often in addiction not wanting to hear truth and so we start shutting down. We even hear what they're saying to us more than we hear what's going on in the conversation. That's often the case.

11.4. Seeking truth is the way to discover our addictions with spirits

Participant: How do I recognise my addictions with the spirits? Because I know that I'm in addiction but what are the signs? Something that I can look out for to start?

Mary: What was it for me? I guess, Karolina, I was really praying and focusing on this addictions issue. So I really began to deconstruct the relationship with dad and I was writing a lot about the emotions that I got from him. And in the previous relationship that I referred to earlier, what were the emotions I was getting there? And I'd just been in this process for a couple of weeks of really looking at that, looking at my interactions with men, and desiring truth I suppose. Yeah, I was praying for it. Because before then I didn't want to know. I actually just wanted to wander around feeling like I'm a good girl that someone can be proud of. Like that's what I really wanted to feel.

Mary: And it wasn't until I set my intention for truth, and to connect really with God and with my soulmate, that it came to me very quickly really in the course of a couple of weeks, I went from big light bulb moments about my relationships with men to one day sitting there going, "Hang on, I'm getting that feeling right now. Who's giving me that right now? Like I can feel when I'm not and I'm getting it now," so I had to want to see truth about it. [01:20:54.12]

You have to be very open to the truth of your own feelings. You see most of us want to stay quite closed to the truth of our own feelings. We don't want to know that we're in an addictive relationship sexually with a spirit, for example. Most of us would feel very yucky to actually contemplate that even. And so we're like ostriches trying to bury our head in the sand about what's really going on half the time. And we need to allow the truth, the passion and desire for the truth to enter us, where we are passionate for the truth no matter what the truth is. No matter how dark and dismal it is, we need to have a passion for it. If you have that strong a passion for the truth, the answers will always come to you very rapidly. That's the way God works.

Remember, I said quite frequently in the first century, "Keep on seeking it, seeking the truth. Seek for it. It will open to you when you seek for it." That's one of God's Laws. If you want the truth badly enough you will always find it. The problem is, we're happy to seek for the external truth, the bits that are out there, away from us. But most of us are very avoiding of the internal stuff, the internal truth, what I really look like inside. And when we seek for that with a passion, then it all comes to us. All of the truth about ourselves comes to us. A lot of it's going, "Urgh!" and a lot of times we're going, "No, no, no more, no more!" because we're so afraid about it. But if we have that underlying desire and passion for God, we will want the truth at all times and when we want it, that's when it comes to our life. Every single time. Guaranteed. That's how God works. God's a loving God who always gives you want you want if the desire is pure.

Seeking truth helps to identify our co-dependent addictions with spirits

11.4.1. Identifying what feelings we give to spirits

Participant: I understand about getting the good feelings from the spirits but I'm not yet seeing how I'm giving to them.

In response to the previous question, you don't want to know yet how you're giving to them. Can you see that?

Participant: You've only just enlightened me that I might be in addiction with spirits.

I agree, but you don't want to know yet that you're giving to them because the instant you want to know how you're giving to them, you'll start feeling it. You'll start realising, "Oh, that's what I'm doing," and you'll start seeing the patterns coming from the childhood patterns with the spirits. So a lot of the times we break the patterns with our parents and then we just engage a whole new set of parents in the spirit world that we now have the same interactions with, basically. That's what we often do. And once we're willing to engage and realise that, "I am giving something to them, I am doing something with them," then we start seeing the truth of the whole interaction. There is never a one way street when it comes to an interaction with spirits. Ever. And we need to understand that.

There is never a time when you are just receiving something from them. They would not be into an addictive relationship with you unless they were getting something out of it too. And the only spirits who are not going to do that are either your guides, who are in a much more loving place, or spirits that are on the Divine Love Path in the Celestial heavens. They're the only spirits who will not enter into addictive relationships with you. The rest of the spirits, including spirits right up to the sixth dimensional space are going to enter into addictive relationships with you.

There are many spirits even in the sixth sphere who want many of you to be the teachers of their material, not God's material. And they then look around for a person, "Who can I connect to? Who can I connect to? Ah! There's one! That person's developing emotionally, they're open to my direction, they've got all of these emotional injuries. I will feed them with my truth." [01:25:00.06]

And as I do that, the spirit's doing that to you, you're then in an addictive relationship. What do you get out of it? You might get glory, power, attention, approval. There are so many so called world renowned speakers on the planet today who are heavily spirit influenced and all they're doing is exactly what the spirit's telling them to do. I've mentioned some in previous discussions. I've actually read their personal experiences to you, and outlined the exact time that they became over-cloaked by those spirits. So this can easily happen by so called loving spirits.

You will feel it, when you're willing to acknowledge to yourself that it's happening where for any spirit to be around you giving you something, they've got to be getting something out of it unless they are at-one with God. Now many of them might try to claim they are but that's a different matter altogether, and often they're not. It's the addiction that keeps on getting met.

12. AJ addresses the audience response to the subject matter

Now guys, can I just address an emotion with all of you? You're getting quite down about this discussion. (Laughter) Can you feel that? It's like you're all starting to get heavy. Can you feel that everyone's sorting of starting to go, "Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. No! No more!" (Laughs) And if I really respect your free will I should stop right now because you don't want to hear anymore. That's fine. We've already spoken for four hours so I understand. But can you see how even the feeling in the audience, you can all feel it. You can feel the feeling coming over you. They're feelings through your attraction, through your addictions. [01:26:55.23]

What do you want to hear from me? "Ah, I'm a lovely person. I've got everything sorted out. I've got my life sorted out. I've got my relationship sorted out. Me and Mary, we're just so close together, nothing could interfere with that!"

Mary: "And you guys are so developed! You are so developed!"

"Yeah, just wonderful!" (Laughter)

Mary: "Like that close to at-onement!"

"The love in you is just outstanding and it's beautiful to see. There's nothing I can say to you about anything." Can you see the addiction in play? See every time I talk about a subject that is challenging for you, for example remember when I talked about the anger subject? Most of the audience who would normally be there weren't even there! When I talked about the parent discussion, nobody rocked up! (Laughter) [01:27:41.28]

Mary: Twelve people!

Well that's an exaggeration, maybe twenty or thirty people rocked up, when normally there'd be hundreds there. Why? Because nobody wants to hear how bad a parent they've been. That's an addiction.

12.1. The power of waking up to our addictions

We're so closed to seeing the truth. The key is to not judge it. You see we judge it and that's what causes us to go into these layers of depression and apathy. You don't need to do that. We just need to be aware. Remember what I read right at the beginning - Divine Love cannot enter your soul until your soul has an awakening to its true condition. The awakening to its true condition is including all of its expectations, all of its demands, all of its unloving behaviour. This is a good thing you're hearing! (Laughs) [01:28:27.16]

Mary: And can I second that? Like honestly having walked this very recently, this is amazing. It is so good. Yes, it feels a bit icky and hard...

At the beginning in particular, doesn't it?

Mary: Yeah, really.

At the beginning it's bad.

Mary: It feels like, "Urgh! I hurt everywhere I hurt. Like bits of me hurt." But the awakening is beautiful.

What Mary found is that she went from feeling powerless in her own progression into feeling a state of in total power and control of her own progression, just by recognising what was in play. Every time you deny it, every time you want to not hear about this, you're taking away from yourself your own power to change. That's what you're doing. And you're giving the power away. [01:29:38.29]

Mary: And you know honestly, especially with this stuff with spirits, the energy that I have now that I didn't have before because unwittingly I was giving out energy in all of these addictive ways all of the time. To actually start to break down the addictions, it's a bit painful, it's a bit scary, often you want to run back but at the end of it, you have more energy to direct in the places that you want to go. And that is really empowering. It's very empowering.

12.2. Addictions with others drain our energy

At the moment, if you could think about it, there are all these tentacles of suction coming off you going out through your addictions and through the people that you're addicted to. There's all these tentacles of energy coming out of you, and it drains the life out of you.

Mary: And you can feel that.

You can feel that.

Mary: If you spend a day with people, how do you feel at the end? "Urgh."

How many people do you come away from the end of the day going, "Wow, that really motivated me I feel really good," and then the other people come away, "Whoa, that was pretty heavy. Boy, I feel like going to sleep now for a few days and having a bit of grog to get me there." Because that's the effect that people's emotions have on you. It sucks the life out of you. And this is what we've got to be careful of is that it's our addictions that cause the sucking of the life out of us.

Mary: And we willingly let ourselves be sucked, "Yeah, here you have a bit of me, I'll have a bit of you, and we'll avoid our true selves."

There's no wonder we've got no energy, it's no wonder by the time we're seventy we're old and decrepit and got lines around us and can hardly do anything. Generally that's the way it is. Sorry, for you seventy year olds who are not like that, then obviously you got a bit more energy than that but this is why our bodies decay. Do you think God created your body to decay? Come on, like God's a perfect God, with unlimited energy. The genetic structure in your body is absolutely perfect. Scientists are still trying to discover why we die. I'm telling you why we die! Because you get your life sucked out of you by all of these addictions that are in play. [01:31:44.27]

And that's what's happening in our life. We're giving and giving and all these different things in unloving ways and it's the unlovingness that sucks us dry. It kills us in the end. We die from it. You call it old age! I don't. I call it sin and error because that's what it is. It's actually the unlovingness that's in our soul that's creating all of these effects. So let your self ponder about these truths rather than just going, "Oh, this is heavy subject. I'll wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow might be better." (Laughter)

That's where we do action, a lot of addiction in action. We'll have a job. Let's avoid all these terrible emotions about how we feel and let's get into the God's Way of Learning Centre. That'll be fun. Do you think I'm going to let you do that? Do you think I've started an organisation to cheer you up? Is that what you think because if you think that you'd better not come along tomorrow. I'm starting an organisation to help you put into practice love and to be challenged so that the challenges expose the emotions within you that are blocking your relationship with God. That's why we are doing what we are doing. The whole discussion tomorrow is going to be about the God's Way Of Love organisation. It's an Organisation that myself and Mary have founded because of our desire. We don't have any world domination issues. We have a desire to demonstrate love in action and it's a lovely tool that we can use to do that, creating things in the process and do you think we are going to let you avoid your emotions, we are going to go "No, you go home" "No, you go home" "Oh everyone's gone home, what's going on?"

So what we want to do is get through this process where we don't want to feel about certain things. Many times when we talk about anger, we talk about fear, and we talk about addictions, many of you get very heavy with those discussions. That's telling you something. There's no need for heaviness here, there's just a matter of identifying what place we're in and working through it so that we can release it. That's all we're talking about. And tomorrow we'll come up with some practical ways you can do that.

13. Closing Words

Mary: I can just reiterate. Do you remember at the beginning I drew my inner circle where now there's joy and God in there along with a lot of grief still? I just want to encourage you because it's just been such a powerful process for me to recognise that God responds to the humble heart, the repentant heart, the heart that is willing to look and see, "Whoa, I'm in total addiction here," or, "Whoa, that's totally unloving and I don't even want to give it up yet." But even just recognising that, it's such a step closer to that inner self where we can actually start to experience joy and God. And isn't that the reason why we're all on this path? Because inside of us, we really deeply desire it. And I know that all of you do because frankly you've got to really want God and really seek truth to be in the town hall at Murgon with Jesus and Mary Magdalene right now, don't you? (Laughter) (Applause) [01:35:30.17]

Mary: It's about humility and I've learnt it probably the long way. It's taken me three years and many of you have watched me on that journey. But I just want to express to you how beautiful it is to be stepping into that place and I know you feel heavy with it but if you can feel empowered in these truths that you're receiving and recognising that, "Wow maybe these just are my stepping stones to joy and God."

Thanks for your time again, guys, today and we'll catch you tomorrow for those of you who we see. (Applause)

