Hi Readers. I realize I haven’t written in almost a year! Here is a quick summary of what I have been up to. (If you want to skip down to the next chapter in The Truth book, click here.)
Prayer and feeling emotions continue to be daily priorities for me, but I still struggle with self-honesty and the willingness to feel all the pain in my soul and the pain I cause to others. Between my conscious requests to God for help, my dreams, and the Law of Attraction, I get lots to work with. More emotional error gets revealed to me as I am willing to feel it, so I can get very discouraged at times. But as I keep going, I always get to a point where there is a noticeable shift and I feel much lighter (until the next emotion needing attention bubbles up).
I rejoined the Mediumship Group back in December and just recently stepped away again since summer is such a busy time for me. I really appreciate this dedicated group of friends who are helping spirits connect with their guides and learn how things work in the spirit world (Divine Truth). It is so wonderful to feel the love that guides have for their charges and so rewarding to assist the spirits. It is sad the tremendous suffering we go through here and in the spirit world due to the lack of understanding of how things work and how profoundly emotions (and our desire to avoid them) affect our well-being and happiness. I look forward to participating again with this group when the cold season returns.
I am playing my fiddle (and tin whistle and bodhran on occasion) regularly with a lovely, honest, generous and highly talented guitar player, Thomas, in our band KinTales. We have had several people interested in joining our band, but various things have kept that from happening (stuff for me to feel about). Meanwhile, thanks to Thomas’s guidance and a fair bit of practice, I feel our music is getting better and better. We are playing at private events and farmer’s markets currently which has been really good for experience and exposure.
My garden has been quite an emotion-stirrer. On the delightful side, I managed to grow almost all my own salad greens through the entire winter this year (and continue to do so through this summer). Only once did I buy a head of lettuce some time in February. That is quite a feat, because our winters get below 10°F (-12°C), and having all those delicious greens right out my back door is tremendously satisfying. I have successfully planted a number of fruit and nitrogen-fixing trees in my garden to make it more of a food forest, which I am really excited about. On the challenging side, I had a complete loss of all my squash-related plants this summer (winter squash, zucchini, melons, cucumbers) due to squash bugs. In my quest to honor love, I try not to kill or harm any creatures (other than the harm caused by the errors in my soul), so I just had to watch and feel (big discouragement and grief as well as emotions like demands upon nature) as the squash bugs destroyed all of them.
I had a proper fence put in around my Watson Wick septic system that will allow me to take more advantage of the moisture and nutrients automatically feeding this area to grow human and critter food bearing trees and shrubs (growing food on trees and shrubs in this kind of septic system is totally safe). I have also made some progress on site preparation for the food forest in the lower part of my property, which will be significantly larger than my house garden. A few of the pioneer tree seeds I planted are thriving and have been given water boxxes to keep them happy during the dry season until they get establish and until the water catchments create more permanent moisture sources.
We had an extremely dry winter this year. Even the juniper trees have been stressed. Summer has been lovely, though, and the monsoon rains have been decent. Most of my swales and water catchment areas filled up nicely and are soaking that precious rainwater into the ground where it will most benefit this high-desert environment.
I love the monsoon season. The land and critters sigh a breath of relief, the garden is happier, it is cooler, the thunder, lightning and rain are exciting, and it is the season for wild mushroom hunting! My friends and I have been venturing off to the White Mountains and collecting piles of Porcinis, Aspen Boletes, Blushers, Puff balls, Lobsters and a few others to dry and fill our pantries for the next year. This is one of my favorite activities. It reminds me of Easter egg hunting and Christmas, the surprise gifts just waiting for us to find them.
I suppose some of you might want to know how I fared in the Covid epidemic. In the very beginning, I had a day where I felt unusually tired. I just napped and rested for the day and was fine. Since then, I have felt a few times where I felt I needed a little more rest than usual, but I don’t know if that was Covid or just the rest needed as I work through emotions. I chose not to get any vaccinations because I prefer to trust that what I am doing, opening to God and working on my soul to grow in love, is the healthiest and most loving thing I can do.
Before we move on to The Truth, I want to say, Thank you! to Jesus and Mary for braving this world to bring this all-important information. And Thank you! to those of you who have sent donations. Your gifts are most appreciated.
I also want to welcome any of you who have more of God’s Love and Truth in your soul than I do to share any corrections that might be needed to my perceptions as relayed in these chapters. As I have stated in the title, this book is “a beginner’s perspective,” (my perspective), but I would like my perspective, along with my soul condition, to always be evolving with more of God’s Love and Truth, and if you desire to help in that way, I would be grateful.
May love, truth, and all of God’s Blessings come to each of you. Here is the next installment of the book:
The Truth
– A beginner’s perspective on what could be the
most important information a person will ever learn
If you are new to these chapters of The Truth, I feel it is important that you start at the beginning and read all the preceding chapters first:
Chapter 3 – The Reality of Divine Truth
Chapter 4 – Introducing: The Human Soul
Chapter 5 – Our Multidimensional Universe – The Earth Experience
Chapter 6 – Our Multidimensional Universe – Beyond Earth
Chapter 7 – God’s Definition of Love – The Emotion
Chapter 8 – God’s Definition of Love – The Necessity and Telling of Truth
and now…
CHAPTER nine
God’s Definition of Love – Desiring and Seeking Truth
In Chapter 7, we looked at the fact that love is an emotion, i.e., “energy in motion.” When giving, receiving, and sharing love with another person, we can often feel this warm, soft, open-hearted energy-in-motion. But there is another essential energy-in-motion aspect of love that occurs in the human soul that is less understood because it happens over longer periods of time and requires more development in emotional sensitivity to discern, and that is love’s “motion” as growth, evolution, and expansion. This quality of love to grow, evolve, and expand is a fundamental principle of love that Jesus and Mary call the Development Principle [1]. This Development Principle, like each of the fundamental principles of love we will explore in this book, applies to every one of God’s creations because, whether we are talking about tiny bacteria, the ever-expanding universe in which we live, or the human soul, all are made by and for love, and love always includes growth, evolution, and expansion. We have all heard of the theory of Evolution as an explanation behind the massive diversity and change possible for living organisms. Some people believe species evolution through natural selection is the primary principle of creation on this planet, but, in reality, the capacity for evolution exists because of the Development Principle, which, in turn, exists because love is the driving force in our universe, and love always makes accommodations for and encourages loving change.
Another principle of love that we learned about in the previous chapter, is that love is always accompanied by its inseparable partner, truth. So, since love and truth are inseparable, does this Development Principle apply to both love and truth? It does. And how does this apply to our human experience? It means that our human souls, to grow in love, must also grow in truth. And sure enough, our souls are designed for perpetual growth in both love and truth, designed for ever-expanding love and constant learning. Why? Because this growth in love and truth is what brings us all the joy, health, and happiness we ever wanted and more (according to our desires). Learning truth is so important to our well-being that our Creator has created laws that compel us to passionately, actively, and continuously seek truth as well as love throughout our existence. These laws are not rigid forces imposed upon us without our input. Rather, they are a wonderful system of laws that interact with our soul to ensure that we will grow in both love and truth, while at the same time, allowing us to choose the subjects, depth, and momentum of that learning and growth. And to make this learning and growth as natural and joyful as possible, God has also designed our souls to attract truth and to naturally desire learning and growth. All that built-in support for truth, and yet, because of our long-standing disregard for love and truth, we have very serious gaps in our understanding of love and truth as God sees them. It is a true testament to our Creator and the magnificence of love that God’s Truth has made it through our heavy cloud of resistance to be available now.
Our resistance to love and truth has not only interfered with our reception of God’s Truth in general, it has also contaminated our view and experience of education itself. Damaging emotions like judgement, failure, blame, punishment, desire for reward, control, competition, frustration, and discouragement are all too commonly associated with education. We have a lot of learning, growing, and correcting to do on the topic of education. Our best option, rather than continuing to rely on the default system of loving laws that include pain and suffering to enforce our learning, is to take a proactive approach to our growth and education, learn the language of truth and love as Divine Truth teaches, and seek out the best possible Teacher, God, to help us grow our souls in love. Along those lines, I hope this chapter helps you grow your understanding of: 1) the importance of truth and education in a soul’s development, 2) the critical role that love plays in the education process, 3) false beliefs about love and human development that are causing us to sin against the loving laws of development and miss God’s Truth, and 4) the importance of pursuing truth about ourselves.
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When we consider education and evolution of the soul, it is important to remember that the soul’s need for growth applies to the entire duration of its existence. We tend to be very earth-centered in our views about life and growth, believing that Earth is where the action happens, whereas, if we believe in the spirit world at all, we consider it a place of “eternal rest” and not much else. In reality, Earth is just the beginning of our education and growth. Our Creator has provided us fascinating and potentially infinite opportunities (when we include God in the process) to discover and learn as we explore our amazing souls, our extraordinary multi-dimensional universe, and our relationship with the Ultimate, God Herself. The brief Earth experience offers us a mere taste of the possibilities available. When we get to the spirit world, we are free to continue exploring our many and diverse subjects of interest, and, if those subjects benefit our growth in love and truth, they will be well supported. Often, we become more motivated to attend to our soul’s growth in love and truth when we reach the spirit world because we can see and feel more clearly the effect that love and truth (or lack of) have on our spirit body and overall well-being. But, as mentioned in the chapter about our multidimensional universe, attending to the growth of our soul while still on Earth, starting now, is always the best choice for the soul, and some benefits to the soul, like certain qualities of faith, can only be gained on Earth.
Within this Earth-centric view of education, we also tend to view the eager and passionate pursuit of education—i.e. awareness, knowledge, desires, creativity, adventure, and experience—as an activity of youth, which, we believe, ought to naturally wane as we get older. We often look forward to and put great effort into planning for our “retirement,” a time when we stop all that “nonsense” of passionate strivings, enjoy the accomplishments of our acquired knowledge and comforts (if we have the luxury of comforts), and rest our weary bones. The irony of this perspective is that it promotes stagnation which adds to the weariness of our bones. Stagnation directly opposes the Development Principle of love and, therefore, adds to the degradation of our souls, which is the true cause of “aging” and “natural” causes of death. We can observe the unfortunate results of stagnation very clearly in the world of nature. (Interacting and observing nature is a great way to gain insight into God’s loving systems and definition of love.) If you plant a tree in stagnant (biologically inactive) soil in a location where there is minimal sunlight and water and constantly prune it to limit its growth, you will succeed in limiting its growth—and ultimately cause its premature death. This is what we do to ourselves when we neglect to nurture our soul’s need for continual growth in love and truth and with similar results; we invite suffering and death. We often make great efforts to avoid “aging,” pain, disease, “accidents” and death, and yet these “negative” events are just the default system of education lovingly providing us feedback and experiences to help us learn and grow. Many people who have embraced the potential of the soul-growth offered by a disease, for example, acknowledge that the experience turned out to be a transformational gift. Many more, however, require the death experience and many years thereafter of reaping the consequences of soul-depleting choices before considering love and truth worthy of attention.
When we make the loving choice to become actively involved in our soul’s growth, we invite the unlimited power of the universe to support us. The adage, “God helps those who help themselves,” applies well to soul growth. We will be assisted in our learning and growth, not only by God’s Laws, but also by the action of our desire fueling more desire. We will discover that learning and evolving is a joy to the soul, and we will want to continue that expansion. If we currently believe that learning and growing is a burden, that belief is due to emotional error which can be healed and released so we can return to the delight in learning and growing that is natural to our human souls. There are so many wonderful things to discover, and God designed us to thoroughly enjoy that discovery. Children, before they are stifled in their natural and eager pursuit of truth, love discovering truth. They passionately observe, explore, experiment, and ask questions about everything. They demonstrate to us what an unadulterated (literally un-adult-erated) attitude about seeking truth looks like, an attitude that most adults lose sight of—the natural propensity of human souls to desire and seek truth and the joy that seeking brings to the soul.
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Education for the soul is different from education for the intellect alone. To educate our soul, we need personal experience with the truth. And that experience will show us the inseparable bond and interplay between love and truth which allows us to truly know a subject. Not only does love require truth, as we learned in the previous chapter, but, for soul-based education to occur, we will discover that truth requires love as well. True soul-based learning, the kind of learning that remains with us long after our years of traditional schooling, exams, degrees, training, and employment—the kind of learning that becomes a permanent part of our soul—cannot happen without love. And that love must accompany truth in both the learning environment and the soul itself for that truth to enter a soul. Among other things that we will touch on, the emotion of love activates, softens, and opens the soul so truth can be received into the soul. We might not have previously considered that love would have a critical role in education, but it most certainly does. And it is a truth that our current education and training systems would greatly benefit by embracing.
Let’s start by looking at the need for love in the learning environment and its effect on a soul’s growth in truth.
When we think of learning environments, we typically think of schools. For a school to be a successful learning environment, it needs to provide a safe, calm, and supportive—in other words, a loving—environment, manifested through its physical atmosphere, management practices, staff, and fellow students. If, on the other hand, the school environment feels threatening (a reality that is sadly all too common these days), that feeling of threat will take precedence in a student’s awareness and directly interfere with learning.
Researchers have found that acute and/or chronic stress, which can be caused by the environment or internal sources, will activate the body’s Sympathetic Nervous System and cause a shut-down of activity in the reasoning and learning center of the brain (the cerebral cortex) while simultaneously stimulating the brain stem, the region of the brain that responds to threat and initiates the fright, flight, and freeze reactions.[2] It is no wonder that we have a hard time learning (not to mention deep, soul-based learning) when stressed.
The internal sources of stress, either acute or chronic, can be particularly problematic. Considering that feelings of stress are always ultimately about our inner experience (a soul at one with God does not feel stress or threat), it makes sense that the presence of chronic inner stress could present a broader and even greater hindrance to learning than issues the outer environment might impose. Stress, which arises from feelings of threat, can become so pervasive and severe that it causes a person to interpret benign and even loving interactions as threatening. This kind of deep-seated feeling of threat has been linked to experiences of early childhood trauma. Children who are raised in an environment that is unloving according to God’s definition of love and who do not release the resulting emotional wounds (for reasons we will look at later) will experience this damage to their soul as trauma. This childhood trauma, which is tragically ubiquitous in our world today, causes the child to adopt a pervading fearful response to the world, the chronic stress-response, which, for as long as it is present, directly interferes with, not only learning, but also healthy development in all areas of a soul’s growth.
God’s Way of healing the soul, the details of which we will be covering in later chapters, is the most efficient way to heal trauma in the soul. But, as we have mentioned, God’s Way is not the only system of education in love available to us. God’s Laws also provide an infallible default system of healing and education which is always working to help us correct and heal our errors in love like those that result from childhood trauma. And it is primarily this default system of education in love that is ever-so-slowly transforming our schools, prisons, food production systems, and the numerous and various human services. While many people continue to suffer from our remaining damaging and barbarian social policies, often found in our prison systems (such as: https://dream.org/news-articles/our-overheated-prison-system/?akid=30650.792717.lpmxF6&rd=1&t=14), many social institutions are at least becoming Trauma Informed and introducing policies that foster healing of, rather than exacerbation of, personal trauma. Those organizations that are making this change are utilizing a simple test called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) Survey to correlate the ten most common traumatic childhood experiences with challenges to health and well-being as a way of growing our awareness, compassion, and remediation of issues resulting from trauma[3]. This recent growth in trauma awareness is a critical step in understanding human development because it shows us how our physical and emotional well-being is fundamentally tied to healthy emotions, i.e., our development in love.
One experienced researcher in the field of childhood development with a greater than average understanding of love, Bruce D. Perry M.D., PhD., through intensive interviews with children and parents, has been able to document not only numerous examples of the connection between the love received in early childhood and a child’s ability to learn and develop a healthy social life but was also able to make sense of cases that had baffled other researchers. His most illuminating cases involved individuals who he studied as adults who grew up to have severe and dangerous social tendencies. Where his colleagues had failed, he succeeded in finding the experiences where love was missing in the early lives of these individuals who had become murderers and rapists because he understood more clearly God’s definition of love[4]. Researchers like Dr. Perry offer the world much-needed support in our understanding of love in human development; however, we still have very significant misunderstandings and blind spots that need to come to light.
One of our biggest blind spots about love’s role in our development is that we insist upon identifying it as a behavior and/or the satisfaction of a physical need rather than the emotion it is. Our social policies regarding early childhood development, for example, focus almost entirely on meeting a child’s physical needs for love—physical safety, adequate quantity and quality of food, water, shelter, affection, and play—but tend to ignore, misidentify, or miss entirely the emotional needs for love, which, as you will discover in your own exploration of Divine Truth, is even more consequential to the well-being and development of a soul than physical needs[5].
Even when we do recognize the vital role that the emotional environment plays in a child’s development, we still tend to limit our view of childhood development to experiences occurring after birth. The reality is that some of the greatest developmental impact upon a child occurs while the child is in utero, where, due to her constant presence, the mother’s emotions have the greatest impact. Remember, the new soul arrives at the moment of conception and is instantly imprinted by all the emotions within its environment, absorbing loving emotions as well as the pain and terror of every emotion that is not loving. If we are going to provide young souls with what they really need for healthy early development, we need to learn to view love as God does, as an emotion, and one that, in its presence or absence, impacts the child from the moment of conception.
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Now let’s assume we have a loving environment and a soul open to learning. We will look at the process of learning itself. When the desire to learn is ignited, most of us begin by acquiring facts. This intellectual learning, which is the primary focus in our schools, is important; it gets us started on a path to greater understanding. But the learning of facts alone is not going to give us the kind of personal, emotional, understanding of truth that will support the soul in its growth.
We can use the learning of Divine Truth as an example. When we are first exposed to Divine Truth, we learn a lot of facts, wonderful truths about our Creator, our soul, and our universe. Discovering these truths can feel very exciting—at last, loving ideas that make clear logical sense! If we are open to our emotions, we may also feel some of the love itself within Divine Truth and feel our hearts expand in joy. As wonderful as our first exposure to Divine Truth may be, and as much as we might believe we are immediately and fully embracing it as truth, in reality, our understanding of Divine Truth at this point has barely begun. Our soul is capable of embracing truth at much deeper levels, levels that takes us beyond the intellect into highly personal and ever-deepening emotional experiences of the truth. If we have resistance to feeling emotions in general, as most of us do, that resistance (as long as it is present) will interfere with our emotional exploration of truth, in which case, a truth may remain (with varying degrees of acceptance or rejection) in our intellect for a long time before we experience it emotionally. That is what commonly occurs. And it is by design. By giving us the individual choice to engage or not engage our emotional nature in the learning process, our Creator has given us personal control over the speed, quality, and subjects of our soul’s development. This is how love educates—in accordance with our desire—a truth that is sadly lacking in many of our education systems. When we have a sincere desire to understand truth emotionally in the soul, that is when we begin to grasp the emotional reality of that truth. The more we are willing to feel, the more truth can enter our soul. As we do this, we will discover a fascinating thing—that every one of God’s Truths is a representation and demonstration of love. When we embrace and feel that love within a truth, in other words, when we personally experience, emotionally experience, that love and truth together, then that truth will enter our soul to become a permanent part of our soul’s overall development.
Our education on any one subject, the amount of truth we can emotionally absorb about a subject, is directly linked to the amount of love we are willing to emotionally experience on that subject. If we reject an aspect of love inherent in a truth, then we will reject that truth. For example, if we are closed to the feeling of love inherent in the truth of free will, we will be unable to comprehend the importance of honoring other people’s choices. We would feel no remorse in the desire to control and/or dominate other people, even though, from God’s perspective, domination and control are egregious sins. Any such refusal to feel will always block our soul’s growth in truth and love until we work through that refusal. If we allow ourselves to honestly and emotionally feel our desire to control and dominate others (but, of course, not act on it) and allow ourselves to feel the grief of having been controlled and dominated by others (a reality almost unavoidable in current family dynamics) , then we would have some emotional understanding of the love and truth within free will.
The level of love and truth we currently have in our soul is a reflection of both our past (indoctrination from families plus personal choices) and the present state of our will, but it can change very quickly when we engage one of our greatest powers—that of desire. Do I really desire the truth? Or do I want to continue feeling justified in my personal version of truth? How much truth do I sincerely desire to experience emotionally? Do I desire to invite God’s perspective of Love and Truth, a perspective that is always an emotional experience? Our answers to these questions of desire have a tremendous bearing on our seeking and finding of truth. We will talk more about the power of desire in later chapters as it is a key to every human experience.
The particular desire that has the greatest impact on our soul’s education is the desire to invite God into our lives, both in order to grow a personal loving relationship with God and for God to be our Teacher. You may recall the two paths of soul development available to us, the Natural Love Path and the Divine Love Path (God’s Way). If we choose to follow the Natural Love Path (growing in love without God), our experience of acquiring truth will be primarily intellectual. Intellectual learning, as we mentioned, is valuable (and is the starting point to most education) but the intellect is just a facet or tool of the soul, so choosing to base our education on the intellect will result in a very limited education compared to an education that engages the emotional nature of the soul. An education in love and truth via the Divine Love Path or God’s Way, on the other hand, engages the true emotion-based capacity of the soul which offers the potential for maximum learning. Love itself—the foundation of all soul development—being an emotion, simply cannot be comprehended by the intellect.
Interestingly, because the intellect is a facet of the soul, its capacity grows as the soul develops in love. Each of us will naturally become smarter the more developed in love our soul becomes. This is because when we grow in love, we are releasing blocks to love and truth in general, thus releasing emotional errors that interfere with the development of all the different facets of the soul, like the intellect. The development of intellect, however, is not an indication of development in love when comparing one person to another. It is just a skill, a tool, of the soul that can be developed. A person who may be considered “simple” could easily have more love in their soul, and therefore be in a higher state of soul development, than a person considered highly intelligent. Many people actually develop their intellect as a way of avoiding the very emotions that would ultimately allow a soul’s healing and growth in love.
Engaging the intellect alone in our learning can help us develop our behavior, intellect, and morals in a loving direction, but only to the sixth sphere, which is as high as you can go without including God in your progression, whereas by developing the emotional nature of the soul and including God in that development, we can progress far beyond the sixth sphere as demonstrated by Jesus, Mary, and the others of the fourteen who developed to the 36th sphere before returning to Earth. Developing our emotional self and including God in our development, as they did, not only engages the entire soul but causes the soul itself to open and expand new aspects of the soul that were previously only potentials. By correctly engaging God’s Way, i.e., the Divine Love Path, we will start to learn directly from God, the only Teacher who knows all, the only Teacher who could possibly teach the ultimate (emotion-based) education of the soul. And when God personally teaches us about truth and love, God offers us some of God’s Personal Feeling about that truth, feelings that are made of pure Divine Love. When we receive this Divine Love, we receive some of the most transformative substance in the universe. It causes our soul to grow and transform towards love in ways that we cannot even comprehend at this point in our understandings of love, far beyond any other method of education and growth in love.
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Our soul’s growth is a unique adventure for each of us. The subjects of truth are infinite, and each of us will approach a subject of truth with unique experiences, desires, personality, and emotional development—each variable affecting our seeking out and acquiring truth on that subject. If I am keen to learn about a particular topic and have no (or few) established emotional errors (errors in love) on that topic, then it will be easy for truth to enter me on that subject. Children are a good example of this. They have less damage related to love, so they are more in touch with a soul’s natural desire to learn and easily absorb truth is offered to them in their physical, intellectual, and emotional childhood environments. In contrast, adults have many well-established false beliefs that cause us to be very resistant to learning certain truth. We mentioned the principle of Preclusion in Chapter Seven which asserts that we need to release false beliefs before we can receive new truth into the soul. A false belief that is tightly held may need a substantial event to shake it loose. For example, if I adamantly believe there is no life after death of the body, and someone close to me dies and is then able to unquestionably communicate the reality of life after death to me, that event has the power to shatter my previously held false belief and open me to the truth that death is a transition rather than an end to life. My false belief will be confronted by the event, and if I let myself feel the emotions that naturally want to arise during that confrontation, (if I allow myself to surrender to the sudden desire to cry, for example), then the false belief can permanently leave my soul and love and truth can enter.
Sometimes we harbor so many blocks to a truth that, when the truth is offered to us, we can’t even imagine that it could be true. We will completely block it from consideration, disallowing it to benefit even our intellect, not to mention our soul. We could hear the truth that longing for and receiving God’s Love and Truth into our soul is the single most beneficial endeavor we can engage in for the wellbeing, development, and joy of our soul, yet unilaterally reject it because of our blocks. Perhaps we have had painful experiences with religions which cause us to currently reject anything to do with God. Perhaps we are blocked to the idea of a personal relationship with God because we can only imagine God as an impersonal energy. Perhaps, due to our experiences of human parents, we cannot imagine God as a Parent Who loves us and wants to help us heal and become joyful. Perhaps we are resistant to feeling emotions. Perhaps we don’t want truth because we are terrified of change. Perhaps we feel unworthy of a loving God or want to blame God for all the pain and suffering in the world. The list goes on. All these issues will get in the way of a soul-based knowing that God is pure goodness and personally loves us and wants us to help us enjoy the ultimate experience as a human being. The good news is that every block is an emotional error that can be released.
Discovering and experiencing our own numerous and stubborn blocks to truth can feel very daunting. Some of the more established blocks may require sustained and focused attention to untangle but with enough time, faith, and a correct engagement of the process, they will. The solidity of our blocks, like our overall soul condition of which they are a part, varies moment by moment, depending on our desires, attitudes, intentions, and actions in that moment. Our soul is constantly changing; it is malleable. It is possible to experience a state of heightened passionate longing for God (prayer) and have several of those blocks loosen their hold in that moment so that, with a healthy flow of emotions, a substantial dose of God’s truth and Love can enter and bring healing to many facets of our soul at once.
Working through our blocks to truth and love requires very personal and active participation. Sitting on our laurels or idly complying with beliefs that others tell us are true without personal investigation and discovery does not feed our soul and can actually be very dangerous for many reasons, like when we adhere to a religion that claims to save us solely by accepting a belief when, in fact, it does not. Truth can only be gained, truly sequestered in the soul, through our own active and emotional participation, never through someone else’s efforts.
In order to begin the process of working through our blocks to truth and love, receiving that love and truth, and transforming our soul into a loving state, we must seek and learn the truth about our own soul. This critical step is where things get very tricky, where the slippery, sneaky, defensive parts of our soul start popping up as the truth about our condition confronts our false beliefs about ourselves. On my own journey, this has been (and still is) one of my biggest challenges—desiring to see and feel the truth about myself, the reality behind my façades, and desiring to accept, feel, and release those errors and facades. If we refuse to discover and accept the truth about our personal condition, we will not be able to heal our errors and blossom into the unique and wonderful person God made us to be.
For that self-inquiry to begin, we need to grow a desire for self-truth that is strong enough to overcome our resistance.
Perhaps you have begun your journey of self-discovery. Perhaps you have contemplated what kind of person you believe you are and what kind of person you want to be. Perhaps you have contemplated what motivates you, what your desires and passions are, and what stirs your emotions, whether those emotions are happy, sad, angry, or even violent. Perhaps you have been on a vision quest or spent time in prayer, meditation, or on spiritual retreats hoping to “find” yourself. All sincere exploration is fantastic. The hard part is seeing and feeling the truth of our hidden parts, the damaged parts, the parts that we are ashamed and afraid of and that motivate us to sin, the parts that cry out for the seeming protection of a facade, or many facades, as is usually the case.
I have mentioned that one of truth’s super-powers is to confront error. When the error is within ourselves, that confrontation will bring up the “ugly,” painful, embarrassing, and violent emotions hiding under our facades. We may have worked hard our whole lives to conceal (both consciously and unconsciously) these parts, but in order to heal and develop your soul, the facades must come down and those parts must be exposed and (lovingly) felt as they are released. This great undoing is where honesty, patience, compassion, courage, and faith are needed while we grow our desire for love and truth and the desire to feel emotions (all emotions). We will need to open our eyes to our numerous facades and errors, be honest about them to ourselves and others, and take the necessary steps to correct them (no matter the consequences), a process that requires us to correct the sinful actions resulting from our errors as well as discover and heal the motivations behind why we cheated, stole, lied, ignored, avoided, judged, and harmed. Rooting out and feeling the truth of our underlying motivations is tricky because our deepest motivations are usually to avoid overwhelming feelings of shame, loss, powerlessness, hopelessness, abandonment, and/or annihilation that drive our sins. Deconstructing our facades that hide the painful truth about our damaged and terrified self is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, thing we will ever do in our soul’s lifetime. But do this we must, because facades cannot grow in love and facades cannot connect with God. Any genuine relationship requires us to be our real self. And when that relationship is with God, we will never get away with any form of facade. We don’t have to be in a good condition of love to begin our relationship with God—we can be the most sinful person imaginable—we just have to be real.
If we are very fortunate, as I was, we may be graced by some loving and sensitive souls who are willing to tell us the truth about the errors in our soul, errors that we are imposing upon ourselves, others, and the world around us. Loving people who offer the gift of truth often realize that doing so will result in them being attacked by us personally and/or attacked by a posse of spirits around us who want to help us maintain our false identity. But truly loving people do it anyway because that is what love does. And they know the power of truth. If we can let the gift of truth enter our soul (a process that may take a good amount of time, prayer, and the release of blocking emotions), we will have received something of immeasurable value, something powerfully transformative. It is up to us to act on the truth. We must make the effort to see and feel the truth of our sins, feel God’s Truth about those sins, feel where those errors came from originally, and feel how those emotions have damaged us and others, so they can be released. Discovering and healing the truth about ourselves can be a grueling and painful journey at times, but truth is also fascinating, and will always lead us where we ultimately want to go, to a life filled with more freedom, joy, and love—and truth—than we can currently imagine.
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I hope, through these chapters on truth, that you are starting to understand the supreme importance of truth in our soul’s development and overall human experience. Truth is so critical to our well-being that our Creator has provided innumerable laws of love that make certain we ultimately succeed in discovering truth. The Development Principle, one fundamental principle behind the laws of love, requires each of us to personally and actively seek truth. To complement our successful discovery of truth, God designed our souls with a natural desire for truth, as young children demonstrate. We looked at the essential role that love plays in our ability to learn and absorb truth into our soul. And we touched on how essential discovering the truth about ourselves is for our growth in love. But there is much more to consider in this acquisition of truth. In addition to our souls having a natural desire for truth, we are also designed to attract truth. How is that possible when we currently live in a world sick with falsity and deception? How do we navigate through all the lies surrounding us and within our souls? Where do we find truth that will set us free from suffering, transform our soul, and bring us sublime happiness? Once we find a potential truth, how do we know if it really is the truth, God’s Truth? We will discuss those concerns in the next chapter. Until then, perhaps this is a good time to consider your current attitudes towards learning, your attitudes about welcoming God as your Teacher, and what subjects of truth you might like to explore to help grow your soul in love and truth.
Resources:
1 – The Development Principle is part of a series on God’s Loving Laws, which I highly recommend. First session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4VN7gKEa2bQaKFtHjctZtHU0zpuXoqbl ; Second session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4VN7gKEa2bQa9dGKEtHhEE2iw9hie9JP
The Development Principle itself is found in a discussion starting with the Life Principle. First session: https://youtu.be/J4Dg4RyStcw (The Development Principle starts at 21:32); Second session: https://youtu.be/dA0OfFxPDWU (The Development Principle starts at 24:24).
2 –How an active Sympathetic Nervous System interferes with learning. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ritual-and-the-brain/201804/why-your-brain-stress-fails-learn-properly; https://www.nature.com/articles/npjscilearn201611; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128009512000182
3 – The ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study:
What is ACEs?: https://compassionprisonproject.org/aces/
What does your score tell you?: https://compassionprisonproject.org/childhood-trauma-statistics/
4 – I highly recommend reading Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook — What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing.
5 – We are talking about the soul’s development here, not the physical life of a body. To a soul, the emotions that underlie any missing physical demonstrations of love are more damaging than the physical aspect itself.
Learning To Live And Love God's Way 