CONTENTS

1 Privacy and secrecy: A boost or bust for finding closeness | Podcast

We all have needs: real, legitimate, have-a-right-to-have-them needs. One of these needs is for closeness. Another need, it turns out, is to have privacy. It’s not hard to imagine that these two can be tricky to weave together…Privacy, then, is not a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have.

So where does secrecy come in?…Take apart any secret and we’ll find the wish to hide something that we think will be unpalatable to someone…What’s happening when we keep secrets is that we fear we’re not in truth. Better yet, we often know we’re not but we have no intention of changing. So then we’re really being dishonest…

2 Reading between the lines of the Lord’s Prayer | Podcast

The Lord’s Prayer is the most beautiful of all prayers because of the way it holds everything—yes, everything—we need to live a glorious life.

OUR FATHER

As we say these words softly inside ourselves, we can meditate on how this must apply to everyone, even those we don’t happen to like…Either no one’s in this flock or everyone is, even those who bring up unpleasant feelings in us…Whenever we have angst about another, there is something in us that needs attention, no matter how wrong the other person may be.

WHO ART IN HEAVEN

Heaven is inside us, not outside. So we must look for what we’re seeking—to find our own perfection—within, where it already exists. It may however be covered over and difficult to find.

3 Exploring the spiritual nature of political systems | Podcast

We’re about to discover, by reviewing the most popular political systems on the planet—monarchy and feudalism, socialism and communism, and capitalistic democracy—that each has a divine origin plus a handful of distortions. We’ll also see how each of them—in their divine and distorted ways—lives in each one of us…

4 Debunking the curious superstition of pessimism | Podcast

We humans are a superstitious lot. There is one insidious form of superstition—pessimism—that is the hidden culprit behind many of our disappointments in life…

It all starts with an inner attitude that goes something like this. “If I believe that something good may happen, I will be disappointed because I will chase it away with my believing in it. Maybe it’s a safer bet to believe that nothing good will happen to me”. This is the game we play with ourselves…

At some point, this playful game starts to go sideways, and then the fun gets lost in its tragically painful effects. Because there is power in our thoughts. And there’s no playing with that power without getting hurt…

5 Preparing for reincarnation: Every life counts | Podcast

We each have a Book of Life and everything gets written down in it…Every incarnation is meticulously planned by carefully following the information contained in our “general ledger”…

The thing that most determines what opportunities we will get to next—and what we need to work on for our overall development—is how much of our current plan we fulfill…If we don’t advance much this time around or we do a rather half-assed job of it, we may be looking at a complete do-over…

6 Unwinding humanity’s relationship with time | Podcast

Imagine we live in a great big house that has one room we don’t use. So it becomes a room for storage. We push a few things into it helter-skelter. And if we had to tidy it up at that point, it wouldn’t take too long. Imagine over time we let things pile up until that room’s filled to the brim. We’re lazy and don’t want to hassle with sorting things and putting them away as we go. Now we’ve got a tougher job on our hands. It’s just like this with the time we have at our disposal…

If we have a problem area and at the first sign of feeling troubled we heed it saying, “Why am I just a little disturbed?”—rather than packing it away into the storeroom of our unawareness—we will be able to sort out what it’s about in jig time…But if instead we let it ride, pushing it out of our mind, it will fester underground. Now it starts to create negative patterns and vicious circles that seem to trap us in wicked chain reactions that eat our lunch…

7 Basking in grace and not building on deficit | Podcast

All religious scriptures of any kind teach the law of giving and receiving, but often it is slightly misunderstood so we put it aside. We think it’s a sanctimonious edict that an arbitrary authority issues forth, demanding we do something so that rewards will possibly be given in return. It’s like a form of bargaining. Of course we resist this—it offends our human dignity. We distrust a universe that treats us like we’re unruly children…

So then what is the law of giving and receiving really about?

8 Articulating the power of the word | Podcast

Holy Scripture starts by postulating that in the beginning was—or actually is—the word. The word is eternal; it will always be. It is from God’s spoken word that all creation came into being, including our personalities…So what do we do with this truth? Well, for one thing, we can become aware that every situation we experience in life is the product of words we ourselves have spoken…

9 Why flubbing on perfection is the way to find joy | Podcast

Whether we realize it or not, we associate a joyful life with a perfect one. We can’t enjoy life if we’re not perfect. Or so we think. Nor can we enjoy our neighbors or our lovers or our situation in life. So let’s pause right here because this is one of humanity’s biggest bonehead beliefs…Essentially, we demand perfection, and that’s just not what’s happening…

It’s time to connect the dots between how our need for perfection alienates us from our true selves, which in turn hoses up our chances for a joyful life.

10 Two rebellious reactions to authority | Podcast

We face our first conflict with authority at a very young age. Parents, siblings, relatives and later teachers all represent authority whose job is seemingly to say No…The child then develops an impatient longing to grow up and become an adult so these restricting walls will go away. But then the child actually does grow up and the face of authority merely changes…Same conflict, different day…

First, let’s explore those who rebel and revolt. If this is our reaction, we see authority as our enemy…The other category includes those who, at one time or another, turned around and thought, “If I join forces with the one in authority, much as I might hate them, I will be safe”. The extreme type in this category becomes the strict law-upholder…

11 Bringing ourselves to order, inside and out | Podcast

In the grand scheme of things, inner order is what we experience when we are fully conscious and there is no more unconscious material left in our soul…Any lack of awareness is an indication of disorder somewhere in our soul. When we’re not aware, we’re not in truth; things slip away into our unconscious and we become confused…

The disorderly mind will become frantic trying to impose a false order. But this only heightens our level of discomfort and disorderliness. It’s like shoving garbage under our furniture so no one will see it. But the whole place reeks of the hidden waste…

12 The right and wrong way to think positively | Podcast

There is a subject of great dispute: positive thinking. As many believe, it is indeed essential for anyone who wants to mature spiritually. Unfortunately, it is often wrongly understood and therefore applied in the wrong way…

It’s always so tempting for us to push uncomfortable thoughts out of our awareness. But we don’t realize that those thoughts then have the power to do infinitely more harm than any conscious thought ever could—even our worst ones…When a thought is conscious, we can deal with it. When it smolders in our unconscious, it’s like a time bomb that builds highly destructive forms around itself…

13 Uncloaking the three faces of evil: Separation, materialism and confusion | Podcast

We are basically a big electromagnetic field that always follows the like-attracts-like rule. Bottom line: we need some information about the three basic principles of evil so we have a more complete and clear view of our lives and what we’re up against…

14 Meditating to connect three voices: The ego, the Lower Self and the Higher Self | Podcast

To get started, we need to understand the three fundamental layers of the personality. And each must be involved in the process of meditation for it to be truly effective. The three levels are: 1) the ego, with our ability to think and take action, 2) the destructive inner child, with its hidden ignorance and omnipotence, and immature demands and destructiveness, and 3) the Higher Self, with its superior wisdom, courage and love that allows for a more balanced and complete outlook on situations…

What we want to do in meditation, in order to be most effective, is leverage the ego to activate both the immature destructive aspects and the superior Higher Self…

15 What’s the real spiritual meaning of crisis? | Podcast

In whatever form it shows up, crisis is always attempting to break down old structures that are based on negativity and wrong thinking. It shakes loose ingrained habits and breaks up frozen energy patterns so new growth can happen. Indeed, the tearing down process is painful, but without it, transformation is unthinkable…

16 Mastering the art of stepping into leadership | Podcast

As long as we refuse to fulfill the natural requirements for leadership ourselves—in whatever way we are called to do so—we have no right to resent or envy leadership in others. Yet we do. The word that describes this phenomenon is “transference”—we react to this super-power the way we react to our parents…The equation is simple: if we don’t assume leadership over our own life, we will need to find a leader who will run our life for us. For no one can live without leadership; we become a boat without a rudder…

17 Discovering the key to letting go and letting God | Podcast

Let’s go deeply inside the phrase ‘let go and let God,’ a much-loved phrase in which there’s more than meets the eye…“Letting go” means to let go of the limited ego, with its narrow understanding, its preconceived ideas and its demanding self-will. It means letting go of our suspicions and misconceptions, our fears and lack of trust…The ultimate aim of “letting God” is to activate God from our heart center, from the innermost place of our being where God speaks to us if we’re willing to listen…

We’d rather trust our own false gods—namely, our ego—than trust the process of letting go…

©2016 Jill Loree. All rights reserved.