Self-Punishment is an Addiction

“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.

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.”

Original Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPbW3jUH0V8 44:46
Transcript:http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/345228/2/the-human-soul-addictions-bribery-fear-threats-blackmail

God Does Not Respond to 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.

Jesus: 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?”

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.”

Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPbW3jUH0V8

Blocks To Truth – Shame and Embarrassment

“If you look at way, way back in your history as a child how many times were you placed in a situation of shame when somebody found the truth out about you? You wet your pants and your siblings or your parents told people. How did that feel? Shame! So what did you do then? You didn’t want anybody to know anything, did you then? Can you see straight away just that one event and a single event like that’s going to cause shame to be attached to truth? In my heart now I will have a feeling that truth is shameful. Straightaway just from that one experience and can you see in my childhood I might have had 20 or 30 or 50 events. If I have been abused sexually I might have 100, 200 of those experiences of shame connected with truth. Many of us have family shames that were covered up. How many of you have experienced that? Where maybe there was an alcoholic parent or whatever, and we are covering up this shame in the family; these are obviously connections then between shame and truth. Truth becomes a very shameful thing then, so shame will be one of the attributes of truth or one of the emotions that we will need to work through before we will be able to let ourselves seek truth.

Allow yourself to work through the blockages for you seeing your own truth. When you do that Divine Truth about you can enter you, but if you refuse if you block that still, if you keep those blockages there, you are actually placing a barrier, there is actually energetically, emotionally; there is this force field barrier around you. To be frank with you, when I’m speaking with you I can feel it so strongly when people come up to me and say, “Could you tell me the truth about this?” and I’m actually feeling quite the opposite emotion in many cases from you.
What I’m feeling is that you don’t want to know the truth about that particular event at all. Because there is this force field barrier around you of not wanting to be emotionally triggered about what that truth is going to open in you. Allow yourself to discover the blockages that you have to truth about your own life and about yourself entering you. When you do that what will happen is this force field barrier that’s around you, surrounding you, will actually fall away and you will become completely open and vulnerable to truth. Initially that’s going to be a very scary prospect; can you understand why? “That means every single person in my life is going to find out about who I really am. How scary is that? And I will find out about who I really am.” How scary is that? What will happen is we will go through this transition phase of getting out of this state where we are trying to block truth from us, into this state where I’m now allowing truth to enter me no matter how bad it seems. Now that in itself is a transition that occurs in the second sphere. Once I get to this stage where I have released all the emotions of that, I’m now in a state where I’m longing for the truth to enter me. Now I’m in the state that can connect to God almost permanently or close to permanently because now I’m open to God’s Truth also entering me.

Remember you can think of God’s Truth, as the doorway to God’s Love so every time you allow God’s Truth to enter you, you also are now establishing a connection with the Holy Spirit and therefore Divine Love can enter you under those circumstances if you long for it. So prayer for Divine Truth is such an important thing and again remember I’m saying longing or seeking for Divine Truth is prayer for Divine Truth.”

 

Source: Transcript Relationship With God – Longing for Divine Truth (Section 8.1) http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/241307

 

 

Facing Personal Truth – Some Practical Advice

“The only way I can progress consistently and without limit is to emotionally accept that I am in a condition of error, that only God is the source of Absolute Truth, and that I must generate within me a pure desire to seek for and find His Truth. This is the only path that will set me free. To do this, I must begin to see myself how God sees me, and I must desire from the heart to come to know Him and His Truths. I must become God-reliant. A side benefit of this course of action is that I will also come to know myself completely, and I will place myself in the condition of being able to receive God’s Divine Love consistently. His Love is the only substance that can transform me into a Divine Angel, and it will also create within me untold happiness.

If I am not conscious of the Divine Love entering my soul, and assuming I think I desire it to enter me, then there must be something wrong within myself for this condition to exist. Although I think I desire His Love, I must not have a sincerely motivated pure desire for it. So I must question my self truthfully and openly if I want to move beyond this condition of stagnation in regards to receiving and experiencing my Father’s Love.

I do this by asking myself a few important questions on a daily basis. These are:

What events are currently happening in my life that demonstrate I am out of harmony with God’s Love, and how have I attracted these events to my life?
What emotions within me are triggered by these events and are those emotions in harmony with Truth and Love?
Do I feel any emotional or physical pain? If so, what reasons within my beliefs, emotions, desires or passions could there be for my experiencing this pain?
How do I portray myself to others? Am I being emotionally truthful and open?
Am I still doing things that God or a celestial angel would not do?
How do I really feel inside, and what tools am I using to deny my feelings?
Have all my actions been moral and ethical? If not, what is the emotional cause for my being immoral or unethical?

As most who know me realize, I have a notebook with me most of the time. I then use this notebook to write down things that I notice in my life that are not in harmony with my Father’s Laws of Love, based on my own honest answers to these questions. I then make those subjects a matter for prayer with my Father.

Coming from a condition of sin, sometimes during my progression I have felt physical pain and yet not been able to identify its emotional or spiritual cause. Or I have experienced frustration. During this time I make the subject a matter of intense prayer to my Father, asking Him to demonstrate to me using whatever methods are at His disposal over the next few days what the true cause may be. I then make an effort to take notice of the events and circumstances that happen over the next few days to see what my Father is telling me is the cause of the issue. I am particularly careful to take notice of everything, even those things of what may normally be called minor, since I have found that it is often the instant mental dismissal of something that has been presented to me many times that has been the cause of the stagnation. He is so Merciful and Generous towards me that He keeps on showing me what is wrong within me even when I have repeatedly ignored the issue, and the closer I return to Him the more I remember the consistency of His Love.

I do these things and much more because what I desire the most in my life is to know my Creator intimately. This desire has been with me for as long as I can remember. My relationship with Him is my passion. He is my never-ending love. It is difficult for me to describe in words how intense this desire for God is within me, and I cannot keep from weeping just thinking about it. Every other desire within me is subservient. I realize that I cannot keep coming closer to Him without confronting all and any error within me that keeps me distant from Him, and just as my desire for Him is personal, passionate and real, so too I take personal responsibility for the condition within me that prevents my progression towards Him. While my soul exists, this will forever be the state I seek.

It is not possible to reach God without facing personal truth, without seeing things as they really are within our own personal emotional and spiritual condition. We cannot fake it until we make it, we cannot counterfeit passion for God; it either exists as a real substantial emotional feeling, or it does not exist and needs to be developed and nurtured by coming to know the Divine Truth. We cannot fake a desire for Divine Truth; we either have a passion for knowledge, or we need to be willing to remove the emotions within us that cause us to reject it.

So rather than becoming frustrated with your progression, allow yourselves to re-examine your own feelings, desires, passions and longings, and be totally willing to face the Truth about yourself as God sees you. If you do, you will find that your relationship with Him will forever grow.

This an excerpt from the original document which can be found here http://www.divinetruth.com/PDF/Books/SelfPrint/A4/Qualities%20Of%20Divine%20Truth%20&%20Facing%20Personal%20Truth%20%28A4%29.pdf

God’s Truth is Infinite and Welcoming Release of Our Feelings.

“Jesus: One of the things we understand when we understand that God’s truth is infinite is we understand that we are a work in progress. That means emotionally and our character is a work in progress. Now for our character to change and become more God like, we are going to have release error. And releasing of error can only occur if we understand how the human soul functions, which is another set of FAQ’s, we understand the only way we can release error is not by trying to overcome it with intellectual truth but rather by the releasing of emotions that cause the blockage of the absorption of truth.

Now we wouldn’t then avoid that process if understood that God’s truth is infinite. We would go, OK, if God’s truth is infinite, I am faced with a future life of infinite growth. That means infinite change. That means that at some point I am going to have to give up my feelings that are out of harmony with God’s Truth and Love. At some point, I am going to have to experience them to release them.

So if I understand this fully, I wouldn’t avoid the experience. I would enjoy the experience because I would know every time I am experiencing something; I am releasing something, and therefore getting closer to God’s truth on that particular subject.

Mary: And I think that is a very beautiful place we can reach where we realize, wow, this is an infinite process and if I can welcome what is coming to me, I will just keep growing eternally. I see a lot of people perhaps have a goal in mind, like I want to be clear of this thing or I want to get better at that thing.”

 

From Divine Truth FAQ Channel Quality 1 What does knowing Divine Truth is infinte look like for me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkjsiv_Goe0&feature=youtu.be

8mins 35s to 13mins 31 secs

The Simplicity of Prayer and Trusting our own feelings

“Now many spirits in the spirit world can actually see the connection, there is a physical connection that occurs between God and them. There’s actually an energy stream that gets set up. The Holy Spirit is an actual energy stream. You could think of it like, if you want to make some kind of concept, this is not true, but if you can think of it like some sort of concept like a little wormhole coming from somewhere to a person, this little cord coming. And in the spirit world you can actually see it coming when the person has an actual desire or a longing, a pure longing for God’s Love.
(00:55.25)
Now the problem we have here on Earth is you can’t see that. All you can do is feel it. Now when I say it’s a problem, I don’t really believe it’s a very big problem, because at some point you’ve got to start trusting your own feelings. At some point, when are you going to do that? You might as well start with this one, start trusting the feeling of love entering you from God. So, what I’m saying is, see God as the most ideal being you could ever perceive, with regard to love. And then start projecting at that being, the feelings that you want to have a relationship with them. (00:56.08)

That’s what prayer is. And that’s what I was talking about with this group of people in the first century and that’s what I’ve been talking about ever since. The reason why it’s such a simple concept, it’s such a simple concept a child can understand it, and yet the majority of people think it’s far too simple, so, “I’m not going to do that. I would rather go along to a mediumship class for three months, talking about how to talk to a spirit and I’d rather do this and I’d rather do that, and I’d rather do this other work and be involved in all these metaphysical things than actually develop myself with love.” (00:56.43)

What I’m suggesting is do the opposite to that. Focus on your love development first and let everything else slide. Because as you develop your love, your joy will increase, your wonder will increase, everything will increase if you focus on the love first. (00:56.59)”

(Relationship with God: Praying for Divine Love)

Needs vs Longing

“When need is not met it creates an emotion that is out of harmony with love inside of us. So if I need something from you and you don’t give me what I need, I then feel sad, hurt, angry, or one of those emotions. Maybe even afraid, but any emotion that’s out of harmony with love that I am feeling in that moment demonstrates that I was in a codependency desire with you. I was demanding something from you that when you didn’t give it to me, I felt this neediness towards you, which was a demand. And when you didn’t give it to me, I got upset, hurt, angry, whatever the emotion was. That’s an indication that I am in need with a person and therefore in an addiction.
But a longing is very different. I can have a longing for you without actually projecting any needs upon you at all and without projecting any demand upon you at all. This is in fact what God wants from you to receive Divine Love because what happens is when you have a pure longing inside of your own soul for somebody’s love that’s not about neediness, there’s a part of your soul that opens that allows love to be received. And you see most of us on this planet have a lot of shut down things inside of our soul that prevent us from receiving love. So when we have a longing for somebody’s love, we open up this vulnerable part of ourselves, which allows love to flow into it. Now that’s not the same as a need; a need is a projected demand that the person love you. A longing is just a longing for their love whether they love you or not and you remain as happy whether they love you as you did when they didn’t.

So what often happens is we’re longing for somebody’s love, this open and vulnerable space gets created, and you see this a lot with teenagers before they get very hurt in love; they have this real strong longing for the other person and they just demonstrate that longing without any subterfuge or deceit. They’re just open about it, “Yeah you know I just love him, he’s so beautiful and he’s gorgeous,” and their eyes light up and you know they have this really open feeling coming from them. But then they get hurt and what starts to happen? Now they’re a bit more guarded with their heart.

But when we’re in a longing space we are not guarded with our heart, our heart is open and vulnerable and therefore
it’s open to being hurt as well. But if I have no addictive emotions in me, will I ever get hurt by having a longing? No. So any hurt that I feel that’s due to a longing is because of an unmet emotional need from my childhood that needs to be released anyway. [01:19:45]”

(The Human Soul: Processing Addictions)

Beginning to recognise our addictions

“The beginning is always becoming consciously aware that this is happening through your emotions. So your emotion is anger, frustration, annoyance, deflation; all of those type of emotions. There’s an addiction not being met, straight away an addiction, I’ve got to write down the circumstances in which this happened. Today the circumstance that happened was that AJ told me a truth that made me feel like, “Oh I’ve got a lot of work to do. I would have liked him to tell me that actually in ten minutes time all of you are going to become at-one with God.” (Laughter) That sounds really good doesn’t it? “Woo that’s really cool!” But it’s not true, so that’s the problem with that kind of thing.

This is the trouble with what we’ve done; we’re so used to hearing sweet platitudes because of our addictions. We want to actually get somebody cheering us up because we want to avoid the emotion of how we really feel which is not that happy about ourselves really, and we need someone to cheer us up in order to make us feel happy about ourselves. And so all we’re doing is we’re avoiding how unhappy we feel about ourselves really in that moment. [00:55:26]

If I can allow myself to go, “Oh okay, right at that moment, AJ said that,” and to be frank with you it doesn’t even matter whether I lied to you or not. Now don’t go and quote that out of context, will you? Because what I’m saying is that although I want to tell you the truth, even if you’re lied to by somebody and it makes your energy go down, there’s an addiction in play inside of you. You don’t even need to worry about what the external environment is really doing to handle these things; all you need to do is feel your own emotional response to what the external environment is doing.That’s all you need to do and you’ll know straight away whether there is an addiction in play or not. You don’t even need to have someone come along and tell you anymore, all you do is feel your own emotion. [00:56:18]”

(The Human Soul: Processing Addictions)

Physical Addictions are driven by unmet emotional addictions

“Every physical addiction can be thought of as when the emotional addiction does not get met. So the problem with most of us is that we are meeting our emotional addictions in much of our life, and because of that we have a less likelihood to have a physical addiction. So actually the people with physical addictions are just demonstrating that their emotional addictions are not even getting met. And, in reality, if a person has a physical addiction often they can more rapidly access the emotional addiction that is not being met more rapidly, because it is obvious to everyone around them that something’s wrong.

You see the problem for the majority of us is that if my emotional addictions get met by you, and your emotional addictions get met by me, we’re both happy. We don’t see that there’s a problem here. But when we look at a guy who’s bombed out on drugs for half of his life, we say, “Yep there’s a problem.” (Laughter) And yet I myself, I’m happy and so I think there’s no problem. But in reality the problem is that his emotional addiction isn’t getting met,that’s why he’s on these drugs; because he needs a physical way of getting out of these emotional addictions, and it’s quite obvious. But the problem for me is that I’m already getting my emotional addictions met and I’m quite happy with it, and that’s not obvious. Sometimes it’s actually harder for a person who’s getting their emotional addictions met and who feels quite happy in their life to progress spiritually towards God than it is for the person who’s down and out and has a lot of problems in their life getting these addictions met and quite often it’s not so obvious. [00:43:24]

In the first century, many of the people who followed us when we were travelling around talking to people, like we are doing with these groups, were actually people who had heavy physical addictions because they could see they had a problem. And many of the people who attacked us were the people who were in heavy denial of their emotional addictions, because they couldn’t even see they had a problem. And the trouble with emotional addiction is that often we don’t even see the problem that’s right there and we don’t see our rage and our anger and our hurt as proof that the addiction is present. We just don’t notice those things.

And if we’re in a very, very close co-dependent relationship with somebody, we can often avoid much of the rest of the pain because there’s seemingly so much joy in that relationship that we don’t even notice why that relationship was created. We feel this relationship is beautiful when in reality it is so co-dependent, and that it just makes both of us extremely happy because we’re getting our addictions met. So for most of us, our emotional addictions are getting met, so we don’t have to go to a physical addiction to detune from our life, to detune from the fact that things are not being met. We go to a physical addiction generally when the emotional addiction doesn’t get met and we don’t know how to meet it. Whatever that physical addiction is, it might be drugs, alcohol, it might be medicated prescription drugs, it might be pain killers, and it might be TV, videos, movies. It might be partying every night, having sex all the time. Not that there’s any trouble with having sex all the time or partying every night, but the issue is, are we using it as an addiction to suppress a causal emotion? That’s the issue.

So when the emotional addiction is met it doesn’t generally generate a physical addiction. When it’s not met then we get the additional layer of a physical addiction. The beauty of a physical addiction though is it is obvious usually to everyone around us and sometimes to ourselves, not all the time, but it’s obvious generally to everyone around us that we have a “problem”. But the issue with an emotional addiction is that it’s not obvious to anyone around us that we have a “problem”, except generally to God, and your relationship with God, because while you’re in emotional addictions you cannot get closer to God. Obviously these talks are all about being closer to God, and so we want to be able to learn how to deal with the addictions, learn how feel about them and do something with them, so let’s look at some of that. Now before we proceed, is everyone clear about the addictions, are there any questions you’d like to ask about them? [00:46:46]”

 

(The Human Soul: Processing Addictions)

Self- Love

“So if you can, over the coming months, start looking at this issue of love of self in a much deeper way. The biggest hurt in the human race is this lack of love of self and this inability to even forgive yourself, let alone anyone else. And if you can allow yourself to work through that emotionally by feeling the emotions that you have about yourself, the shame you feel about yourself, the guilt you have towards yourself. All of these different emotions you have about yourself, the sadness that you have about yourself, how you haven’t realised your potential and how you feel about that inside of yourself. And if you forgive yourself for all of these things by feeling those emotions and releasing them and talking to God and feeling Divine Love flow through into you, what will happen is in the end you’ll not remember those emotions anymore. You’ll be able to remember every single thing, every single event in your life and you’ll not have any judgement of yourself about it. And you will not think, but you will feel that you are the same as every other person; you will actually feel that you are the same as the persons who are right now living up in the twenty second sphere state in an at-onement condition; you will feel that you’re equal to them. Imagine that. How many times today on earth do you feel you are not equal to somebody? Why do we glorify people on earth, why do we treat them differently? Because we feel we are not equal to them. Imagine if you released all of those emotions in yourself and forgave yourself for every single thing that you‘ve been ashamed about in your life, you’ll get to a point where you’ll actually now feel inside of yourself as an emotion that you are the same as anyone else.”