The Sun is brighter than the candle

Our life is like a candle. Sometimes it is lit and we feel happy, full of light; other times it is dark and we feel sadness or suffering. But when the sun comes into our lives, it outshines the light of the candle and the candle becomes irrelevant. The sun is the spirit and light of God. This is our true life, our true joy. May we all strive to bring the transcendent light of God into our hearts and lives so that the changes and chances of this passing worldly life serve only to strengthen our trust and faith in Him, the Source of our being!

“Do not grieve at the afflictions and calamities that have befallen thee. All calamities and afflictions have been created for man so that he may spurn this mortal world -- a world to which he is much attached. When he experienceth severe trials and hardships, then his nature will recoil and he will desire the eternal realm -- a realm which is sanctified from all afflictions and calamities.”

--from the writings of the Baha'i Faith

More hurt, more love

The person who is more sensitive and aware, who sees how people are not being loving, and gets hurt by it, must be the one who is more loving, tolerant, patient, and accepting of less-than-loving behavior. This is the suffering prepared for those whose hearts are open and tender, who are ready to receive the anointing of the Holy Spirit. These souls will feel more pain, but will be more loving. For their love will be the love of God which they will call upon to comfort their broken hearts. Know that God is close to these souls and He will protect them from the darts of the worldly-minded.

"Cleanse ye your eyes, so that ye behold no man as different from yourselves. See ye no strangers; rather see all men as friends, for love and unity come hard when ye fix your gaze on otherness. And in this new and wondrous age, the Holy Writings say that we must be at one with every people; that we must see neither harshness nor injustice, neither malevolence, nor hostility, nor hate, but rather turn our eyes toward the heaven of ancient glory. For each of the creatures is a sign of God, and it was by the grace of the Lord and His power that each did step into the world; therefore they are not strangers, but in the family; not aliens, but friends, and to be treated as such.

Wherefore must the loved ones of God associate in affectionate fellowship with stranger and friend alike, showing forth to all the utmost loving-kindness, disregarding the degree of their capacity, never asking whether they deserve to be loved. In every instance let the friends be considerate and infinitely kind. Let them never be defeated by the malice of the people, by their aggression and their hate, no matter how intense. If others hurl their darts against you, offer them milk and honey in return; if they poison your lives, sweeten their souls; if they injure you, teach them how to be comforted; if they inflict a wound upon you, be a balm to their sores; if they sting you, hold to their lips a refreshing cup."

--from the writings of the Baha'i Faith

False self or real love?

One important reason people feel they cannot be emotionally vulnerable around others is that they are afraid to feel the pain of rejection, abandonment, shame, or criticism that came as children when they were vulnerable to their parents and failed to receive the proper love and acceptance from them. There is no real and solid love in them which would give them the sense of safety needed to be emotionally open to someone else. So we create a false self, one that fits into society's standard of how one should be, and as adults we use this fabrication to win the acceptance and validation from others that we failed to receive from our parents. As a matter of fact, the seeds of this false self began as children, as we conformed to our parents' and early caregivers' hopes and expectations of us, and molded our fragile personality into a shape which would give us the sense of being liked and loved. But we were not really loved, because this love was conditioned upon upholding this false self-image at all times, in order to feel safe around those whose praise and approval we thrived on.

Most of us don’t realize we are doing this. Our society has been so conditioned by patterns of denial, deception, and emotional protection, many of us cannot even entertain the idea of being emotionally vulnerable for too long, lest we risk losing our ability to function and succeed in our practical worldly responsibilities. Indeed, it will take a herculean effort of several brave souls at first in order to create the kind of sustained safe space needed to change the course of generations of socialization and overcome the resistance to conformity. For this, we need to find real love!

Real love means we are loved for our soul, just because we are a creature of God, and for no other reason. And real love is God's love. Love from us is only real when we are surrendered to His love, and our selfish motives are purified. And this purification is an ongoing process—a never-ending one. What we have in the world presently are noble attempts to fool each other and to gain approval for our fabrications by following what is basically an arbitrarily-created set of standards, one that does not reflect the spirit and ways of a loving God, although in some cases it may appear to do so. These standards, created by members of a “lamentably defective” society, create divisions among people. They create deep alienation in the hearts of those who follow these standards, and who give up God's standards. The fleeting pleasures that come from conforming to the ways of the world will ultimately create veils over your heart, and deprive you of the joys of the soul, and the true spiritual pleasures for which God has created us.

Why be vulnerable?

Being emotionally vulnerable with someone means allowing yourself to feel the various not-wholly-physically-caused sensations of your inner body, commonly called emotions, when you are in the presence of another person, including emotions that are specifically a reaction or response to that person. Usually, we are only aware of thoughts and judgments about the person or we are distracted with thoughts about the various aspects of our own life. We have learned to shut down our feelings since our previous experiences of being in touch with our feelings led only to hurt, fear, shame, and embarrassment. And we’ve learned that in order to be a success in this world, we must disregard our feelings. So we have covered these natural human sensations with a thick skin, with veils and barriers, and overlaid them with an artificial personality and self-image, which serve to ward off all the bad or uncomfortable feelings that might come up. And we see others doing the same thing, so it must be okay. As a matter of fact, we seem to get praised for having particular types of personality such as happy, smart, knowledgeable, successful-looking, attractive, spiritual, religious, funny, sweet, kind, charming, sexy. So we modify ours to gain approval and respect.

Now under all these fancy masks and costumes is something else altogether. In the basement of our psyche, is housed all kinds of fear, confusion, anger, hurt, desire, resentment, guilt, shame, hostility, inadequacy, and various aspects of ourselves we don’t like to acknowledge. Most people actually never confront these powerful feelings, for fear of exposure, fear that their whole artificial world will collapse.

One must ultimately reclaim all these hidden aspects of oneself by allowing the repressed feelings to emerge, and accepting them. In order to create love and unity, we must allow the emotional part of ourselves to be experienced, since God gave us these feelings for very important reasons. We can’t just suppress them and pretend everything is fine. We can’t fool God and we should not deceive others in this way. We all want to feel good and feel loved. We need to admit when we don’t feel good or loved, so we can find the answers to the problem of suffering for ourselves and for the world.

It is important that we stay open to all the thoughts and sensations that emerge as we relate to someone. Then we learn what to do with these thoughts and feelings, and what they mean—what they may teach us. We learn about ourselves, and we learn to purify our thoughts and feelings--not exterminate them. We must be loving with ourselves and not too forceful. We offer up what we feel to God, and as we receive His love and knowledge through faith in Him, our thoughts and feelings are purified and transformed, and His light and love envelop us. This brings us closer to God, closer to feeling His love, which will cause us to love others, and will greatly contribute to uniting the world.

Fears and desires

We perceive people through the filter of our fears and desires, as well as through the filter of our conditioning as to how we are supposed to view people. We project our fears, desires, and views onto others, and perceive them through these filters. What is a person really--when we see them without our filters? We don't know. That is the deeper truth, and that is where we must start. Then we can begin to let God guide us to truth.

One obvious example is how a man may see a woman through the filter of his sexual attraction and desire. Or a single woman may see another woman's baby through her desire to be a mother. In a work environment, we may see others through our fear of being fired, or being seen as inferior or incompetent.

We see ourselves according to an image, as well. And much of this image we have acquired through the projection of others, because that is how they wanted us to be--so we became that way to gain approval, and cover up the pain of vulnerability and inadequacy we felt. Since we were not loved for our inner self-- since no one saw that, understood it, or appreciated it, we formed an artificial self which conformed to the image others had of us or wanted us to be, which served their own desires and fears! Mother wants her child to succeed in the world because she never did, and felt inadequate. So she projects that fear of facing her inadequacy onto her child, and must see the child succeed (in the world) to make her feel good about herself. Then the child never feels loved for who he is inside, but only for the manufactured and synthetic image and behavior of a 'successful' person. Inside, both feel inadequate, and even more so because the message is that you're not good enough just being you--you have to be something artificial in order to be acceptable. This is a vicious cycle which must be broken by a few brave souls.

Here's one radical method for a small group:

Two or more people sit in a circle. One gets in touch with his immediate fears and desires, and verbalizes them. It may be, "I am feeling fear and anxiety right now. I want to say something smart so I appear competent and confident. But inside I just feel I want to be liked and accepted by you. I am scared I will be judged and rejected. I'm afraid that even saying this is wrong, and I feel ashamed about myself for even opening up like this. I have been running away from this place of neediness and vulnerability my whole life. Opening up is just bringing me more fear, but I guess since I feel safe to share it, it also brings comfort and trust."

Then you remember God's love and presence--that He is there listening and ready to take away the fear and replace it with healing love. The other person speaks as well…

About feelings

These are some of the feelings that we could have underneath the personality we use to relate to people: fear of getting/being hurt; need/desire to be liked/loved; guilt for past wrongdoings; shame; feeling inadequate, deficient, flawed, unworthy, worthless, unlovable; fear of being seen as wrong or bad or not good enough; fear of being rejected; anger/resentment towards particular people or towards no one in particular, or towards everyone; desire for all kinds of worldly security especially good health and material comforts; fear of illness, loneliness, death; afraid of making mistakes or being seen as weak; fear of God's punishment; various other unnamed and unspecified anxieties, fears, and desires.

Even if we speak about these fears and desires with someone, we often don't actually let ourselves feel the emotion as energy in the body--we are too busy explaining ourselves to the person. And when we're alone, we rarely are aware of deep emotional sensations, since our lives are filled with ways to distract ourselves from uncomfortable bodily sensations, especially ones that have a strong emotional charge.

Some would say what's the point of feeling things deeply? Well, what's the point of tasting things, or seeing things, or hearing? These senses are part of the body and have important functions. Same with emotions. They are put in our body to receive and reveal to us all kinds of information about the external and internal environment of the body, and they are used to respond to and relate to other people, to ideas, and to things all around us.

An important function of the emotions, I believe, is to apprehend the spiritual reality. We need to feel love, don't we? It is not just an idea in our mind. We feel hurt or loneliness, and then we want love, lasting love, is this not so? We feel an anxious feeling if we do something wrong, don't we? These are emotions revealing to us a response that we need to consider for our physical and spiritual survival.

Emotions have a magnificent and complex functioning we have yet to understand. Science is just beginning to appreciate the power of emotion in our lives. Too bad in the current social and economic system of frenetic struggle for material security and rampant escapism, we are unable to value emotions and regard their place in our lives. We have not learned how to manage feelings, and we are not taught their purpose in our lives. So we learn to ignore them, repress them, or appease our suffering with quick fixes to squelch any negative or painful feeling we may have. After all, we have an image to uphold for others, and this is the way we procure material advantage in this society. God willing, one day soon this trend will be reversed and we will learn how to manage and integrate our feelings, listen to their wisdom, and allow them to add depth, wonder, and healing to our lives.

True healing

In this individualistic culture, we like to think we can get healed and become whole so we can pursue and achieve our goals and dreams of marriage, family, career, and service. But we will never be healed and whole until everyone on the planet is healed and whole, since we are all connected and are as one soul and we are intimately affected by each other. And it will never happen that everyone is healed and whole in body and mind. There will always be illness and suffering of various kinds. We should continue to research, discover, and implement all kinds of material remedies for body and mind. But we must realize we will never completely eradicate suffering and we can never become healed and whole through material means alone, and our healing is dependent on the healing of every other soul on the planet. If you want true healing, become entirely surrendered to the Lord and Creator of humanity, and become whole through the breaths of His Holy Spirit. Then if our body is sick, or our feelings are hurt, or our mind is exhausted, we still have an eternal peace and comfort, and with this spirit we can serve and have our marriage and our work in this world.

Love and knowledge

When we like and dislike traits in people, it is a projection of our ego conditioning. Below our filter, is the reservoir of pure love for all. We cannot truly judge another, since we do not know how God sees him, we do not know his capacity or his upbringing. Yet the inherent laws of morality and religion are for all. This is still the ideal, since following them brings unity. But how each is following them has infinite determinants, and only God can be the final judge. We can love all despite their character traits and actions. We should love all, because that is how they will grow and change to better conform to the ideal.

To truly love someone, we need to be cleared away of our own ego concerns, or we will not have the space to listen and love. True love comes from God, and from communing with his spirit. Otherwise, we just create a false ego self which listens and speaks from the point of view of our particular ego conditioning. We must access the spirit realm in order to truly love another. Until then, we should be honest about the fact that we still have our own ego needs, fears, and desires. And together we can bring ourselves to God in prayer and worship. This way, we learn to rely on God when loving each other, instead of creating a false self on top of our inner fears and desires. Conventional love is usually only this false self connected to a warm feeling of false ego power and human relatedness, which does not access the Holy Spirit. Then a dependency and attachment is created to this false self in ourselves and others, and a veil is created against the Spirit. One must surrender even these attempts at love, in order to access the Spirit. These attachments on the human level seal off the Spirit, and become substitutes for one's relationship with God.

When we teach someone anything, the first thing to do is to love God and to love the person. The point is not to dispense information, but to create unity and show love. The knowledge is a reflection of God's grace, and the point is to glorify God. So hidden motives should be uprooted. These motives include self-exaltation, in order to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth. If this is the case, one should notice the inner shame, feel it, and surrender it to God, knowing that one is made worthy by the grace of God, not by one's selfish efforts--except by those efforts to acknowledge God and commune with Him, and do His will.

Kalimba 3 (kalimba music)

Kalimba with circular tremolo, reverb, echo, chorus. Free-form.

Spiritual effort

The idea of attainment when one is motivated by guilt, mere duty, fear, or as compensation for a sense of being wrong, bad, or inadequate, which indeed is often the main underlying motivation for all kinds of accomplishment in life, is not going to result in real spiritual fruit such as spiritual communion, detachment, spiritual grace and bounty. That is why so many New Age paths reject the idea of spiritual effort, and are appealing to so many people. This idea of 'effort' activates the sense of being bad, wrong, or not good enough, and these core wounds are difficult to reconcile with the idea that we need to improve, grow, or get better. It brings up images of original sin and inherent deficiency. We like to think we are fine the way we are. The fact is that we are LOVED no matter what, but we are as children and we need to learn and grow.

Most people were not given unconditional love as children, so have a nagging sense of inadequacy in their subconscious. Parents and schools usually train kids to feel value and validation only when they are excelling and achieving. So, many people are attracted to teachings that emphasize how you are valuable and acceptable as you are, rather than the idea that you need to improve, attain, grow, and achieve. But often the misunderstanding of Western religion is due to faulty training from parents and teachers, who fail to convey the All-Embracing Love and Forgiveness that exist simultaneous with the injunction to grow, change, and improve. We encourage children to grow and improve, but we can do it with love and mercy, so they always feel loved and accepted in all stages of their growth. This is how God sees us! He loves us always, even though we fall short of the divine standard, and His love sustains us through all our struggles and striving! But it is often difficult to access that Love; indeed it is a mystical world of infinite radiance, beyond this ephemeral one! And parents/teachers do their best, but as they are entrenched and inured in the present materialistic system, it is hard to pause long enough, process emotional blocks, and then access and feel the divine love as a palpable reality streaming into the heart and soul. So we have much work to do, brothers and sisters!

Although some of these eclectic and Eastern spiritual teachings have the ability to placate us and make us feel temporarily better about ourselves, they do not have the power to root out core wounds of inadequacy or cause us to soar into the kingdom of detachment from self and this material world. Often it’s the teachers’ or gurus’ approval that people receive into their hearts, and this becomes a substitute for the  Manifestation of God, whose teachings are the source of life and light, and the only source that can burn away the veils that we have acquired from this world of illusion. It is true that many Eastern spiritual teachings provide us with in-depth wisdom and understanding of the human condition, and offer us many techniques and practices to alleviate some of the suffering that comes from daily living. But unless we turn our hearts to the Manifestation of God for this day, we will never experience the true potential of the human soul as it was meant to be in this world.

Short quotes and notes on life and spirituality 1

Growing in spirituality means having a deeper realization of your need for God.


People believe in and trust in human love, but not in God’s love, even though God created humans, and He is the Originator and Author of love, and His love is infinitely greater than any human’s love.


People don’t like to feel painful feelings. They use materialism as an escape from unpleasant feelings. They don’t admit that they feel disconnected from God and are materialistic: relying on job, money, house, family, people for comfort and security.


We say the world is a mess. God says yes, it’s a mess, but it’s a perfect mess.


You must let yourself feel the pain of God’s judgments (or the consequences of your actions) in order for it to work as a deterrent for future wrong actions. If you numb your pain, you won’t learn or grow from your mistakes. If the pain is not a result of wrong action or personal weakness, then the suffering is a test from God for the growth of your soul. Either way, suffering is a beneficial test from God. But if we numb the pain, repress it, or escape into material pleasures, we will lose the opportunity for human depth, relationship, love, connection, compassion, as well as spiritual growth, love, unity, closeness to God, love for God, feeling God’s love, healing, mercy, and compassion.


There is nothing but God-goo surrounding you.


You can’t be attached to the teaching work, your understanding of the process of spiritual growth, your understanding of anything, the work of helping people, your accomplishments, your knowledge, any person, your thoughts or feelings. Just cling to God—attach to Him only. Then you will know selfless love. No one can generate or produce selfless love, obviously. We must untangle from our attachments first, otherwise it will always be selfish love. To the extent we are detached from this world is the extent to which we can love others.


Your spirituality is different from your worthiness. Not everyone is spiritual, but everyone is worthy.


I want someone who is made happy by my presence, and whose presence makes me happy.


People use religion for ego power and ego security. It breeds guilt and competition just like the work/school/family/friends world.


We need to shed the husks of ego patterns, and reveal the vulnerable stuff inside—then shed that husk.


We don’t know our destiny; we can’t figure out our destiny. God does what He wills. All we can do is use our gifts and talents to serve Him by surrendering our all to Him, and by making choices in life that conform to the best understanding of His Word. His destiny for us is that we completely trust in Him, and entrust our future to Him without knowing what will come of it.


If everything God did seemed outwardly just, then we could never have the opportunity to exercise our faith in Him.


Most people have a negative relationship to suffering. We want to try to have a positive relationship to it by embracing it and seeing how God uses suffering to help us grow spiritually and reach out for His love. It also helps us to forge bonds of love with others, and it promotes detachment from worldly things.


Insecurity and fear come because others do judge and criticize us, and that hurts. We judge others in the way we fear others will judge us, or in the way we judge ourselves. By judging others, it gives us the power we lose from being judged and criticized by others or ourselves.


When you become emotionally dependent on someone, it produces a sense of expectation and entitlement from the person. When you don’t get what you want from the person, you may get angry with them because you think they owe it to you—but that is just coming from your attachment to them and lack of connection with God’s love.


The more you get hurt, the more your heart breaks open—the greater measure of love you can receive from God as you turn to Him for comfort.


Human beings are like flowers. We need to be continually deriving sustenance from the soil of our trust in God, and opening up our hearts to the sun of His grace and love.

Transformation prayer (audio)

I offer a prayer for transformation and I get real with my longing for unity and intimacy.

Transform the Struggle (audio)

This is one of my older talks on spiritual transformation.

Spiritual talk on walk in WV (audio)

Here I am walking in nature while visiting my family in WV August, 2008. I videotaped the walk as I brought God to mind. The nature really helps me feel God's love and healing. (At the beginning of the talk there is static from the wind, but it lasts only a minute.) The video can be seen here (part 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2lAE_MPOI

Meditative musings (guitar playing)

This I recorded in 1994. It is all improvisational lead guitar with a Boss DR-5 rhythm machine playing background.

What is Truth? (audio)

Here is a talk I recorded on 7/7/08. After a busy July 4th weekend, I attempt again to find the truth, my truth, and process my pain a bit.

Contemplation and Rest (guitar playing)

This was recorded in 1990, and it’s a guitar jam to a Casio keyboard accompaniment. It is from my first ‘album’ entitled ‘Contemplation of Life and Spirit, and the Concomitant Intermingling of the Two’, renamed 'Guitar Musings Vol. 1, Contemplation of Life and Spirit'.

Get real and give it to God (audio)

I’m in the park, and I do my spiritual transformation work as I teach about it.

Short quotes and notes on life and spirituality 2

If we praise or love people because they exhibit certain qualities, then it is conditional love. Then our likes and dislikes determine which people are worthy of praise and love. We should love and praise all people, and love them despite their personality. Any quality you see is just a development and manifestation of the compensatory self. So you’re just praising the person’s ego. He should be praised and loved for his soul, and for God--for we are praising God, who created all people.


We must look beyond personality and be a SOULSEER!


When we feel sadness or worry about someone, it is basically because we’ve lost our connection with God. We don’t have faith and we don’t have love. In order to help someone, we need to have strength and power from God. Instead of worry, we can have faith. Instead of sadness, we can have compassion. How can we help people if we become weakened by their hurt, sadness, and pain? As well, we have to be comfortable with our own pain and weakness and turn to God with our pain and weakness in order to help others do the same, so that they can feel comforted by us in their pain.


“If life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” Turn the sourness of suffering into the sweetness of God’s healing balm, as you supplicate the Holy Threshold.


The greater the hole of need and desire, the greater the faith and love that fills it!


Install God in your secret inner weakness and He will replace it with His strength.


Pain is necessary and positive. Without it, we wouldn’t build, invent, or work for justice. Without suffering, we are dead. It is a necessary part of human life. What is negative is denying or repressing pain, and then saying that we are transcending it. If there were no suffering, there would be no need for prayer, supplication, love or compassion. Our hearts would no longer grow wide. We would grow proud and self-satisfied. Indeed, God works through the suffering of His chosen ones. This is His way, and it will ever be so. Whoever tries to live without suffering is doing a disservice to himself and to the Cause of God.


These are our basic feelings: fear of getting hurt; and desire for comfort, love and connection.


Look how they posture all day, even for God!


It’s simple: God is our foundation and is the primary Reality. Then there is the human mind and its perceptions, feelings, and will. We need to align with God. The problem comes when we put our perceptions and will before God; and we shouldn’t rely on our perception of God, either. That would be putting our perception first. How can we know God except for our perception of God? That is the path of mystics, my friend!


The biggest comfort and security about remaining deluded and trapped in illusory self is that everyone else is caught in it also. So it seems the right thing to do, and there is apparently validation and fellowship in this illusion.


True spiritual awareness is an integration of self-awareness and God-awareness. It is not a denial of the self, with its lower nature. But the lower nature, as it is held in the light of God-awareness, becomes transmuted, and is then seen in its purified form as an expression of God’s grace and creative power, to be used in service to humanity as an expression of His all-encompassing Love.


People are riding on the cultural engine of materialism and individualism, and can’t seem to get off the train in order to enter the Kingdom of God.


Pain and suffering from injury, illness, or emotional hurt is good for us. It can humble us and cause us to bond with all others who are similarly hurting and suffering.


Spirituality is experiencing my humanity as a divine creation.


Sexuality is my humanity wanting to fuse and merge with another’s humanity.


Anger is masculinized discontentment.


Until you become filled with the Holy Spirit, all your efforts toward humility will be in vain. And after you are filled with the Holy Spirit, all your efforts toward humility will be in vain.

Emotions, time, and God

One can use emotions to connect with God. When you feel your feelings, you link yourself to a realm which includes past and future. Your fear remembers past moments, and anticipates future events. It is a warning signal that the soul needs security. The challenge is to fill it in and heal this pain with faith in God and not worldly objects. So one must hold the feeling in the body and call upon God using faith. When the spirit meets the feeling, the feeling will transmute. It is helpful to see how the emotion links you to a timeless realm—or one which includes all time realms. This is an indicator that your awareness is closer to God, since God also includes (and transcends) all time realms. The emotion is like a vehicle to travel through time into the timeless eternal.

Wordless Meanings (audio)

This is an earlier talk, from May, 2004, so it has a bit of a different energy. I start with some guttural utterances, in order to accurately express what I feel in the moment. As the talk unfolds, I connect with God/Oneness, and I end up doing some real praying, and the whole talk is quite deep.

Techniques for lessening or loosening anger that we have toward someone:

1) Focus on and feel the anger and judgment you have for this person. Notice that you are angry or judgmental of his outer behavior--his false, ego shell. Inside, he is fearful and alone, and his behavior is just a compensation for this inner insecurity; he is just asserting himself in a world of scary, competing egos. He is just trying to fit in and be loved. His bad behavior is a result of feeling alone and unloved, so he lashes out at others in desperation. But inside, we are all weak, needy people, wanting love and acceptance. Try to love what is inside the person.

2) Feel the anger and judgment you have for this person. Don’t focus on your thoughts and judgments about him, such as what he does or did wrong, how he is not behaving correctly, how he hurt you, how you are right and he is wrong. But focus on the feeling of anger in your body. Feel it as energy inside you. Know that it is covering up a hurt, a need inside you. Underneath is a softness, a vulnerability, a hurt. Can you sense the hurt inside? Let yourself feel the neediness underneath, and perhaps even cry. It is you who is hurting, who needs love. We project onto others and hold them responsible for our inner hurts, and it comes out in the form of anger, judgment, and resentment. By holding others responsible for our suffering, we forfeit our power to heal ourselves.

3) Realize that you are angry and judgmental because your ego wants him to be different because of your unfulfilled needs. Inside, you are weak and needy, and you want a behavior from him which satisfies you in some way. Can you notice his behavior with detachment? He is still in the hands of God at all moments. Hand him over to God. It is not your job to be angry at him. Know that God will help us as we put our trust in Him. God created him, and He will help soothe your hurts and needs, and loosen your anger towards this person.

Why do we feel guilty?

We feel guilt because we don’t feel accepted and acceptable for who we are inside—for our real feelings including all our inner drives, and our behaviors and actions resulting from those drives. It began as children when we discovered it was wrong to do certain things and act certain ways, because we were punished, criticized, or in some way made to feel bad for our behavior. There was no explanation why those behaviors were wrong, and we were too young to understand explanations anyway. But we didn’t feel loved when we did those things. But we noticed that when we acted in certain other ways, our parents and peers responded positively, so we knew to act in those ways in order to gain approval, love, and acceptance.

So when we did things that met with disapproval, we felt bad and wrong, and this translates into guilt. It carries over into adulthood. Of course we develop guilt from our religious school teachers as well. We understand God as a being who approves of certain actions and behaviors, and disapproves of others. We feel accepted and loved if we perform certain actions, and we feel cast out and unacceptable if we perform others. And additionally, if we don’t perform certain actions we feel cast out or accepted depending on whether those actions are deemed approved and acceptable, or even required. Initially, others teach us what is approved or blameworthy. As we grow, we introject these beliefs, and they become our beliefs. Just as parents and teachers condemned us for our ‘sins’, we begin to condemn ourselves and set up an inner critic and judge, who monitors whether our behavior conforms to the standard we have been taught and have inculcated.

Behind the feeling of guilt is the need for acceptance and approval, or the need to feel loved for your inner being, not for who you pretend to be, or who you appear to be on the outside. We all have the need to be loved, accepted, and valued. But since no person has pure and unconditional love for us (love is not just a feeling, and we are usually only ‘loved’ by those who like our outer personality or our possessions, or by those who feel responsible for us), we never received a love that penetrated to our inner being. Real love understands all our drives, all our sins, and loves us always. When we receive real love, we feel forgiven for our sins. We don’t want to sin anymore because we are celebrating the purity of love and we exult in the spirit of love. This love purifies us, and makes us want to be pure. It satisfies us, so the pleasure of sin holds little appeal. Real love comes from God, and we can access this love through the Prophets of God.

Healthy remorse, which comes from a developed conscience based on sound moral and ethical training, can free us from guilt. We recognize our wrongdoing, turn to God for forgiveness, possibly apologize to someone we wronged, and then attempt to do better. Here, there is no lingering sense of being a bad, guilty person. We all fall short of perfection, we all 'sin'. But it is a fallacy to believe that we are inherently guilty, wrong, inadequate, deficient, unworthy, and worthless. These identities we assumed as children were based on very flawed ways of controlling our behavior.

(more): We hold onto guilt so we don’t have to feel the pain of not being loved and accepted in our weakness. When we were young, our parents punished us and criticized us when we did something they interpreted as wrong or bad. They made us feel as though we were wrong or bad for doing it. We couldn’t realize that they did not know how to give us pure love based on reflecting the spirit of God. We believed them, so we believed we were bad. Now, we use the identity of being bad or wrong as a way to ward off the pain of not being loved, just as we did as children. We think that by thinking we are bad, we are punishing ourselves, as we should, because that is what our parents did. We actually become the judge for ourselves, instead of letting God be judge. We think that by condemning ourselves, we will appease God. But God wants us to trust His love and His justice, which comes from communion with Him, and letting Him forgive us, as we try to do better. Basically, we are using our parents’ form of justice and applying that to ourselves, instead of using God’s justice and love for our lives.

How to love people and not backbite about them:

1. Everyone wants to be happy and avoid pain; they want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. They have learned behavior patterns to accomplish these goals.

2. Everyone had a different upbringing and they developed different coping mechanisms in order to fulfill their needs for security and material and emotional happiness. Try to understand how their behavior is just a result of these conditioned responses to life, and they are unaware that what they are doing is causing you pain.

3. Imagine if this person said those things about you—how would it make you feel?

4. Imagine if that person heard what you are saying about him—how would it make him feel?

5. If you can get in touch with God’s love—His love for all of humanity--then you can cast a ray of His love from your heart to that person. God created everyone and His love surrounds all—so we must love all from God’s love.

6. All people were once small, helpless babies. Imagine that person as a small, helpless baby, perhaps as he was all those years ago. All adults are still like that baby, with the same needs for security, comfort, and love.

7. Imagine that person in a terrible car accident. You pass by on the street and see this person hanging out of his car, injured, crying for help.

Pleasing people and God

We learn at an early age to please people and we construct a false self in order to get people to like us and to win their approval. We do this with parents, teachers, bosses, peers, and friends. Then of course we do it in intimate relationships. Then we get hurt, we get angry, and we rebel against the idea of pleasing people and submitting to the will of another. So we create another false self that does what we want, when we want, and says we're not gonna give our power to anyone. Then we become lonely, angry, and resentful. Neither created self is true. We don't even know who we are anymore. I'm afraid we never did, since we have always been posturing to gain approval and acceptance from others. We think we have to do something to earn love.

We relate to God in the same way. There is no direct relationship with God--it's always: well, what do I have to do? Am I good enough, did I do it right, what did I do wrong this time? There's a sense of guilt and inadequacy inside us, and we want to appease God to win His favor. Just like we do with people. Or we don't, if we're rebelling against that! Oh, if we're rebelling and angry inside, we might not even believe in God or we'll think religious people are all hypocrites (which may be true, but that's for another note). There is an honesty in this latter approach, but there is still a hurt person inside.

So, what do we do? I think we need to just face the fact and the feeling of being hurt and needy inside. We all want love and acceptance, whether it's from people, or from a 'God', which for most people is just a giant Parent. God is much more than that, by the way. We don't know how to just be, because inside we have such pain, guilt, and fear. But then that is what we have inside, so that is very much part of who we are. Yet, in this society, we can't just be hurt, needy, and guilty. How does that pay the bills? Who will like us if we're sitting there being hurt and guilty? Yet, just this is needed if we are going to progress spiritually and have authentic, loving bonds with each other and with God. After we get comfortable with all we are inside, we can realize that God is and always has been a shining bright Light of Love and Truth that exists whether we are a good boy/girl or a bad boy/girl, whether we have a happy face or sad face. He is constant, no matter what we think of Him, or what we think of ourselves.

If we can just cut through all our attempts at pleasing people and God, and get down to that core need for love, underneath our resentment and rebellion, our self-doubt and fear, we will have a possibility to find what we are all searching for. We have to support each other in reaching this kind of vulnerability, though, and it is no easy task. And if you can't do it, try not to think, "Oh, I'm not doing it right. This guy says feel my fear and neediness underneath my mask, and I can't, so I guess I'm no good." I really don't think I have that much influence on people, but my goal is not to make you feel worse! Unless it leads ultimately to your healing and freedom. Feeling our pain without guilt or judgment is usually the first step to healing it!

Rebelling and conforming to religion

Most people who rebel against religion do so because they want to feel free to do what they please. They don’t want to follow another code of laws, since they do that all day at work, and even in their family life. And as a child they were told what to do and were made to feel bad or inadequate if they didn’t follow the ‘rules of behavior’. So they certainly do not want a whole other list of do’s and don’ts to run their life. Religious laws just poke and prod at an unhealed inner wound, which is the feeling of not being good enough. Now here comes religion which commands us to change, be different, do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that, you should do this, you must do that. How is that going to help a person feel free and happy? 

The problem is the context. Since the original childhood wound, everything in life is seen through the lens of ‘does this make me feel good about myself, or bad about myself’? Does this cover my feeling of insecurity, or does it expose it? Since we are all trying to escape and cover our feelings of insecurity or weakness, everything becomes distorted, and we cannot see things in their intrinsic worth and value. It becomes all about escaping the hurts and wounds received from childhood and in our lives. If we can see this, observe this, we can create some detachment from our incessant and unconscious denial and avoidance mechanisms, and begin to see what is good for us from a more objective or detached perspective. Then we can read the Scriptures from a place of reason and truth, somewhat detached from self. But the danger here is that we will intellectualize everything, and use this as another way to avoid the feeling of insecurity. You see, for those who don’t rebel against religion, but who embrace it instead, religion and following the laws and performing the rituals becomes another way to ward off the sense of insecurity and inadequacy—the childhood wounding—that lurks beneath the surface.

Soultime

There is no present moment, because that refers to time, and time is an illusion from the side of human interpretation. The past is just as present as the present. The soul develops from implications of the past. So, the past is present in the present. In the soul realm, time in the way we see it, is incorporated into the substance of the soul, but it does not manifest in the way we see time. We cannot say our true self is a self divorced from the past—ours or the collective past. The true self incorporates the past into the soul realm, and transmutes it to its own substance, one which we can know only through spiritual eyes. The soul is also affected by the future in even more mysterious ways. Again, from the soul’s vantage point, future and past are one. The soul exists in another, higher dimension.

It's not your fault, it's not their fault

It is easier for a child to believe that he is to blame when he feels hurt by his parents. If he is to blame, then he deserves the pain. It is justice, his mind reasons. He did something wrong and bad, he is wrong and bad, therefore the pain and hurt is reasonable and he deserves it. If he were to realize he feels hurt because the parents were unjust, or were acting out of their own ignorance or lack of love, it would be too painful. This would mean he is unsafe, his parents don’t have real love, protection is an illusion, there is confusing and painful injustice. This pain is too much to bear, so the child believes he is to blame, and then all is well.

When we are older it is like this. If we are to blame, then the world is fine. It is just that you feel hurt, because you are bad, you deserve the punishment from people or from God. Ah, the world is fine, people are good, it is just that I am bad and wrong, so then the pain is reasonable and justified. Now if I see that other people are wrong or ignorant or unloving, what a terrible thing that is. Then I am really unsafe, I can’t trust anyone, and the world is not loving at all. This is a worse calamity for my heart and my life. This is more painful.

Yet this is just the reality we must face in our lives if we are to truly seek God’s love. When we discover that the people in the world are not the all-wise, all-loving people we thought they were, when veils of conditioning and idolatry fall away, then we see that people have been acting and posturing, and are covering their own fear and hurt. Oh no, we live in a world where no one knows truth or love. Wow, we really need to seek for something eternal and real. When we realize we are not any worse than other people, but we ascribed wrongness and badness to ourselves as a child, then it is a painful reality. All are in sin, all are unloving. We are truly in a desert world. We must seek God, Who is real.

If we hold on to the notion that we are bad and wrong, it will veil us from the truth. It will protect us from the pain that others are not as they say they are. Under the victim identity is hurt, even resentment. We had some notion that the parent was not acting out of love. It was put into the unconscious. Now we have resentment for the love we never received. It is too painful to acknowledge. But now we can face this because we know God loves us even if people cannot.

Okay, now we know it’s not our fault. But we’re still not sure. We still have the sense that we’re not good enough, we’re bad, and everyone else is doing it right. But if it’s not our fault, then it must be their fault. After all, we’ve got to do something about this nagging sense that it’s somebody’s fault, and somebody’s got to take the blame. So we project that sense of blame and shame onto others. Ah, it’s their fault, I’m absolved! Kind of gives you a sense of power. Ego power. Okay, fine for now. Underneath, we still feel we’re bad and wrong, but for now it’s covered up, and maybe if we don’t feel it now, it will go away and won’t bother us. Inevitably something happens, we feel hurt, and our inadequacy demon rears its head.

Okay, I get it. My parents didn’t give me perfect love, so I have a sense of not being whole, a sense that I’m not quite right, there’s a hole in my heart, and somebody’s to blame. Maybe my parents, maybe my ex-spouse, maybe my religious school teachers. The wound hurts a lot inside. It gets triggered by so many things. There is a strong emotional charge inside. There is anger and resentment towards people, particular people. What can I do? Well, if I get a good job and a good standing amongst my peers, I’ll surely feel good about myself, and that will cover up my wound. Or if I get a wife and family, with wonderful kids, I will feel whole and I will feel joy. After all, my religion says I should have these things. Oh, of course if I follow the laws of my religion, and do what the good book says, then I will certainly win favor with God and I will gain the approval and respect of my peers and teachers. This way I will surely feel great and my feelings of fear and inadequacy will be gone forever.

Hmm, but why is it that no matter what I do, there is this gnawing fear and guilt that somehow I’m still not good enough? And no matter what I do in the world, there is still a sense of longing, of being incomplete, like there is some higher love I am just not getting.

If we step back, we can see what is happening. All of us carry wounds from our life. We cover up this hurt, and the fear of getting more hurt, with many things. We try to conform to what people expect of us. We did this with our parents. We had little choice. We had to do what they said and become what they wanted us to become in order for us to receive their approval, and to receive the benefits of childhood, such as comfort and security. Inside, our wounded heart went into hiding. As adults, we fit into the little molds and roles carved out for us in society. These acts ensure that we feel secure and that we continue to receive the material benefits that we’ve been taught make our lives happy. Playing the roles also ensures us that we will be liked and respected by others, so we don’t have to feel hurt and lonely, and so that demon of guilt and inadequacy doesn’t torment us. We blame others, but others hurt us because they are caught in the same trap we are. They are just doing their best to ward of their feelings of inadequacy or fear—they just want to avoid feeling hurt as well. So we can’t really blame them.

But now we find ourselves constantly doing things, running away from our pain, caught up in this worldly game of acquiring things and people, and attempting to prove to ourselves and others that we are worthy and good enough. Good enough for what? For love, for acceptance, for approval—because inside we still feel unworthy, inadequate, guilty. Boy, do we need something different. Something not of this world. Something to renew us and heal us and cause us to know that we are approved and accepted and acceptable. But more than that. We need to know we are loved, loved deeply, and not because of anything we did. We are loved because we were created. God created each one of us, and He doesn’t make mistakes. Since He created us, we can be sure He meant for us to be here, and there is a divine reason for our life. His love is ever-present. He knows about us, even if we don’t know about ourselves. We can put our trust in Him. We can take our confusion, fears and guilt to Him. He knows what we do, and He knows how to help. We all want to be loved and to love others. Let’s turn to Him for instruction--to the Manifestation of God’s holy light. Through Him we can learn what is real and what is false. It will take time and work to reverse the conditioning and wounding and mistaken understandings we have been taught by society. But we can help each other. Please let’s help each other do this.

Kinds of ego

Core ego strength comes from love received in early years or mystical experiences: feeling the love of God sufficiently to create a sense of core love and security.
Superficial ego strength comes from external validation from others in adult life; worldly pleasures and worldly security from money, possessions, job, relationships: friends, family, etc.

Then comes mystical presence and an experience of transcendence of self/ego. This can lead to ego strength, but is not necessarily ego strength if it is accompanied by an acute and continued acknowledgment of the Manifestation's presence and superiority.

When one needs to ward off feelings of inadequacy and deficiency, the ego structure is more rigid and less permeable. When one grows up with love from mother, the ego structure is more flexible, since there is not the sense of doom that accompanies release of ego defenses. Of course if you grow up with love (ego/worldly love--the only kind you'll get from parents these days), you might have less pain and therefore less incentive to strive for spirituality and transcendence of ego.

There is spiritual materialism and there is spiritual intellectualism, which is talking about spiritual things without any transcendence, emotional changes, or transformations occurring.

Being a good person and following the laws

One of the main benefits people receive from following the social and moral laws and rules of religion is confirmation of their identity of being a good person, so this identity can successfully ward off the feelings of inadequacy, guilt, shame, and the feeling of being unloved. In this approach there is no real inner experience of the deeper benefits of following these laws, such as the pure grace and love of God, freedom in the spirit, transcendence, etc. Following social laws is certainly of some benefit to the individual and society, and creates order, but does not necessarily create spirituality and love in the heart, which is the foundation of real benefit. Also, there are all the spiritual laws to consider, and many do not even approach these!

Progressive people often rebel against following the laws of God when this compliance is used for ego validation. Yet their own inner feelings of guilt result from this same attitude and approach to the laws of God. They intellectually realize that this is a flawed approach to following the laws of God, but emotionally it is still what has been ingrained and conditioned into their psyche.

This approach revolves around the idea that your value and worth is dependent upon how well you follow the letter of religious law, as it is dictated to you by parents, teachers, and leaders of religion. In this approach, there is no real spiritual mercy, grace, love, or forgiveness. The sense of inadequacy engendered by falling short of this standard and other man-made standards is the driving force behind almost all worldly accomplishments, as people rush to compensate for this sense of weakness. The result is a hollow and materialistic culture filled with artificial and alienated people.