Phoenesse

To be in harmony, we have to walk straight in three areas: physically, mentally and emotionally. All three sides of our nature must work together, like two people running a three-legged race, for a human personality to find unity through growth. Having any one area underdeveloped will have a crippling effect; it will take the entire personality down. Our feelings are often left in the dust… In every child’s life, there will be circumstances that are unhappy; disappointment and pain are the...

Our defenses work by blocking access to our emotions, so they choke off our ability to get to our feelings. We’re going to need to lower our weapons…Every tear not shed is a block. Every protest not spoken sits like a lump in our throat, causing us to lash out inappropriately. These feelings feel like bottomless pits... Feelings, which are moving energy currents, will change and transform as long as the energy is flowing. But freezing our feelings stops the movement and therefore stops...

One of the subtle bodies that every living being has is called the Higher Self, or divine spark. The higher one’s spiritual development, the faster these vibrations will be…Ever since the Fall of the Angels, our Higher Self has gradually wrapped itself in various invisible layers of more dense matter that is somewhere in between the density of the physical body and the Higher Self. Say ‘hello’ to the Lower Self… The Lower Self, which also varies from soul to soul, is made up of our faults...

Our spiritual work, which comes in answer to our prayers, arrives in the form of a conflict or a friction which then activates some combination of the three personality types in us. Something happens that makes us feel we’re being treated unjustly, so we will have a chance to recognize our inner errors and purify our souls…The moment we say a prayer asking for help and strength, all hell is going to break loose. That’s when we know our prayers are being answered…Yet we think the frictions in...

An important difference between our superficial intellect and our real self is that we can direct, manipulate and govern the intellect using our will; we can’t do this with the real self. Of the two, the real self is the more intelligent one. We are so conditioned to put a laser-like focus on the use of our thinking ability and willpower that we believe we can reach self-realization through an act of sheer will; we think we can use our minds to develop spiritually…It’s our real self that...

There’s a direct correlation between being unhappy and not believing in ourselves; our self-confidence takes a hit that is proportional to how badly we feel. Our idealized self-image is supposed to avoid all that by supplying the missing self-confidence. This, we think, by way of our unconscious reasoning, will lead us straight down the road to pleasure supreme… We simply can’t be more than we really are in any given life situation…What we can do is have a genuine desire to better...

There are three major divine attributes—love, power and serenity—that in the healthy person work as a team. They maintain flexibility amongst themselves so one never drowns another out…But when they are in distortion, they step all over each other. Then love, power and serenity get distorted into their evil twins: submission, aggression and withdrawal… In our efforts to master our difficulties, largely created in childhood and then perpetuated into adulthood through our wrong solution...

Children have more than just a desire to be loved; they want to be loved exclusively, without any limits. In other words, every child’s desire for love is unrealistic…Since they seldom receive an adequate amount of warmth and mature love, children remain hungry for it throughout their whole life…Essentially everyone—even the most diligent spiritual seekers—overlooks just how strong the link is between the unfulfillment of our childhood longings and our present-day problems. This isn’t just a...

From practically the time we were born, we have been creating our own impressions about this thing we call life. The only problem is, most of the time our conclusions are wrong…They are based on a certain limited child logic, but they are nonetheless in error. As we grow up, these wrong conclusions and the attitudes they spawn sink out of our awareness where they set in and start molding how our life will look…The word the Guide uses to refer to these wrong conclusions is an “image”… When...

So let’s talk about pain, and more importantly how to dissolve pain caused by old patterns…The climate we grew up in affected us—it was like perpetually receiving a minor shock…We suffered and believed our suffering was unchangable, which conditioned us to create defenses—highly destructive defenses…We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and put it out of our awareness, where it still smolders in the unconscious mind…Our defense mechanisms of aggression,...

We’re here because planet Earth is a perfect match for the negativity remaining in us; it offers conditions compatible with our inner landscape, our inner splits. We’re confused about reality and we have a headful of crazy concepts…Where this prevails there’s always conflict, due to split concepts that divide the psyche and don’t arise from the truth …So Earth is nothing more and nothing less than a classroom for people with splits. Take a look around and we can see the opposites of duality...

If we apply these teachings to our lives, they will work for us in finding out the truth. There is nothing we must believe…If we want to become capable of experiencing genuine happiness, we must learn how to course-correct back into alignment with spiritual laws… None of this can happen by merely concentrating on our outer problems. We must look deeper and find the corresponding inner problems, which always, always, always are the cause of the outer ones… Expressing our love for God in our...

There is one fundamental quality that is the core element of who we are…This means that each one of us have kept a kernel of perfection—our original nature—basically intact in our core essence, although it’s now covered by the Lower Self and layer upon layer of imperfections. So we have two missions. One is to sense what our basic light is, and the other is to realize how these three buzzkills of self will, pride and fear collude to cover it up… They are the fundamental blockers of our...

As children, we learned that the highest authority—even higher than Mom & Dad—is God. So it’s not a surprise that we bundle up all our painful subjective experiences with the Ones-Who-Say-No, and dump them on God. Presto change-o—a God image has been created… As kids, authority figures were forever popping up everywhere. And when they stopped us from doing whatever it was we enjoyed most, we viewed them as hostile…To whatever degree we experienced fear and frustration, to that same degree...

We have both a conscious mind, the stuff we know, and an unconscious mind, the stuff we don’t know we know. The unconscious is by far the stronger of the two…The unconscious should be credited with far more than it typically is…It’s what controls our fate…Fate is nothing other than the events that occur due to the governing forces of our unconscious. It’s the tiger and we’re the tail… The black hole of our unconscious includes our petrified wrong conclusions about life, our destructive...

Self-perpetuating cycles of pain are what result from the conflict created when two creative forces go in opposing directions inside us…Naturally, everyone’s favorite direction is toward the light…But in reality, this is a world in which there are forces that oppose the light… Take, for instance, the physical level. The entire physical being is striving for health and wholeness. When there’s a disturbance that pulls the other way, we feel pain…If we were aware that in addition to our desire...

As we slowly but surely make progress on our path, we become more alive and more honest in our feelings and ability to relate. We “sacrifice” old reactive patterns and discover that nothing good has been given up and plenty has been gained. It’s hard to remain skeptical. At some point in our journey, we are going to run into a wall of our previously concealed but now plenty-conscious negative intention. In our whacky, mixed-up psyches, we unconsciously want whatever it is we fear…Further,...

More whole is more happy. Our goal, then, is to use meditation to unify our whole selves, folding in the split off aspects of the Lower Self that remain in separation. Consider the truth that whatever is inside, no matter how painful it might be, cannot be avoided, but rather must be expressed and released. And that, friends, is what meaningful meditation is all about. Our beings are steeped in a potent and highly creative substance, called our soul substance…We can think of the soul...

The stronger and deeper our convictions, the more substantial are the forms that exist in our soul. There’s one soul form worth talking about specifically, because it exists in each and every one of us to some degree. This form is shaped like an abyss and it’s made completely out of illusion. The size of this abyss varies for everybody. But whether it’s a crater or a dip, we have to look this threat right in the eye and not blink, taking full self-responsibility for it… We might feel like...